I love Ansible.

What's scary about shell scripts is the lack of idempotence (if you accidentally run them twice, things break).

What's annoying about chef/puppet is the bootstrapping overhead -- you can't start from a blank slate system, because you still need to install puppet-client or ruby+dependencies. So now you're paying to store a bunch of semi-pre-configured images with some out-of-date ruby gems or an old puppet-client. If you want to start from a blank image, then you're using shell scripts to install the toolchain that will let you avoid using shell scripts (or worse - doing it by hand!).

Ansible is idempotent ssh + shell scripting, so it solves the 'blank slate' problem nicely. It only requires python, which is bundled by default on ubuntu servers.

This weeks edition of Servers for Hackers goes from using ad-hoc commands (shell and other modules), to Playbooks and finally abstracting everything out to a Role with templates, files and variables.

I clicked on this thinking it would be something involving the ansibles from the Ender's Game series which allow instant communication across large stretches of space. I should probably take my lunch soon.