Information Technology

Again, simplicity is key. Ansible is a configuration management tool that is similar to Puppet and Chef.  Personally, we found those two to have more overhead and complexity to our use case– so we decided to go with Ansible instead. We know that Puppet and Chef probably have a richer feature set, but simplicity was our desired KPI here. We see some tradeoffs between configuration management using Ansible and the option to simply kill and spin new application instances using a Docker container. With Docker, we almost never upgrade machines but opt to spin new machines instead, which reduces the need to upgrade our EC2 cloud instances. Ansible is used mostly for deployment configuration mostly. We use it to push changes and re-configure newly-deployed machines. In addition, its ecosystem is great, with an easy option to write custom applications.