Introduction to Ansible Transcripts
Chapter: Introduction
Lecture: Meet Your Instructor
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Here's some context for who I am and why I'm teaching about Ansible. My name's Matt Makai and I've been a software developer professionally for about
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5 years, the first three of those in Java and then, since then, almost exclusively, Python with a little bit of Swift mixed in there as well.
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You can find me on GitHub, or on Twitter @MattMakai and I'm the creator and author of fullstackPython.com
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just read by over 100,000 developers each month so that they can learn how to build, operate and deploy their Python powered applications.
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Python's been my go-to language for both side projects and professional development for over 10 years and that's what originally got me into Ansible
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because Ansible is written in Python. It first took off in the Python ecosystem and then, grew from there into other programing ecosystems.
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As a Python developer, I first heard about Ansible in 2013 and my own growth as a software developer has paralleled
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Ansible's growth as an open-source project. Instead of just showing you a few slides with more about my background
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let's look at the history of the Ansible project and where I've been able to contribute and where I've been able to learn from it.
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Ansible is open-source so it can be found on GitHub at github.com/ansible/ansible. If you take a look back at the logs
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the earlier pieces of the project you can see most of the original ones are by Michael Dehaan, who's the creator of Ansible
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and also co-founder of the company that was eventually sold to Red Hat but still runs the Ansible project. I discovered Ansible around the 1.0 release
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back in the start of 2013. The project was still in really rough shape back then but it worked, and the potential was there.
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I must've played around with it on side projects and followed along as each incremental release built out new modules, and fixed bugs;
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Michael Dehaan and the initial community really built out the project and made it smoother from whence they had started.
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In mid 2013, Michael came up to Washington D.C. where I was living at the time to give a talk at a DevOps meetup about Ansible
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and this is where I really started to get engaged with the community. In fall of 2013 I was finishing up some consulting projects
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and was getting ready to start a new job at Twilio which I began in early 2014. I took a couple months off at the end of the year
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before I started my new job after my consulting projects had ended and hacked on Ansible full time to really understand how the project worked.
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I created a prototype based on my deployment knowledge having worked with Django for a long time created a prototype project called, Underwear
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which was a Django module that hooked into Ansible and made it possible to deploy entire Django projects
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to servers using a Python manage.py deploy command. In early 2014, I started speaking about using Ansible to deploy Python projects
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and I wrote my first Ansible module that is now included as a part of the Ansible project. The Twilio module shipped with Ansible version 1.6
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in early 2014. It allows you to use the Twilio API in your playbooks if you want to send text messages while running your Ansible playbooks.
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Ansible put on our first conference in 2014 so I spoke at that then wrote another module to use the centigrade API so you could send emails
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and that was included in version 2.0 around late 2014. While all this was going on the open-source community in the Ansible quarantine
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frequently shipping releases making the project better and better and keeping that momentum in the community.
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I used Ansible to write my deployments book and as a part of the Python for Entrepreneurs Course that Michael Kennedy and I did together;
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huge upgrade to Ansible came in version 2.2. This is where the Ansible quarantine became much more serious about Python 3.0 compatibility.
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It's gotten better and better with each release. We are going to exclusively use Python 3.0 throughout this course
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as Python 2.0 is rapidly approaching its end of life. Ansible continues to evolve on GitHub every single day
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and as you become more comfortable with the project we'll spend a lot of time in this repository taking a look at the source-code
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so that you can better understand the how to use modules and how to build your own modules as you get more advanced with Ansible.