Ansible's story

Let's take quick a look at who wrote Ansible, and also what Ansible means.

The term

Before we discuss how Ansible started, we should quickly discuss the origin of the name. The term Ansible was penned by science fiction novelist Ursula K. Le Guin; it was first used in her novel Rocannon's World, first published in 1966. In the context of the story, an Ansible is a fictional device that is able to send and receive messages faster than light.

In 1974, Ursula K. Le Guin's novel The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, was published; this book features the development of the Ansible technology by exploring the (fictional) details of the mathematical theory that would make such a device possible.

The term has since been used by several other notable authors within the genre to describe communication devices that are capable of relaying messages over interstellar distances.

The software

Ansible, the software, was originally developed by Michael DeHaan, who was also the author of Cobbler, which was developed while DeHaan was working for Red Hat.

Cobbler is a Linux installation server that allows you to quickly deploy servers within your network; it can help with DNS, DHCP, package updates and distribution, virtual machine deployment, power management of physical hosts, and also the handoff of a newly deployed server, be it physical or virtual, to a configuration management system.

DeHaan left Red Hat and worked for companies such as Puppet, which was a good fit since many users of Cobbler used it to hand off to a Puppet server to manage the servers once they had been provisioned.

A few years after leaving Puppet, DeHaan made the first public commit on the Ansible project; this was on February 23, 2012. The original README file gave quite a simple description that laid the foundation for what Ansible would eventually become:

"Ansible is an extra-simple Python API for doing 'remote things' over SSH. As Func, which I co-wrote, aspired to avoid using SSH and have it's own daemon infrastructure, Ansible aspires to be quite different and more minimal, but still able to grow more modularly over time."

Since that first commit, and at the time of writing, there have been over 35,000 commits by 3,000 contributors over 38 branches and 195 releases.

In 2013, the project had grown and Ansible, Inc., was founded to offer commercial support to Ansible users who had relied on the project to manage both their instructors and servers, be they physical, virtual, or hosted on public clouds.

Out of the formation of Ansible, Inc., which received $6 million in series A funding, came the commercial Ansible Tower, which acted as a web-based frontend where end users can consume role-based access to Ansible services.

Then, in October 2015, Red Hat announced that they were to acquire Ansible for $150 million. In the announcement, Joe Fitzgerald, who was Vice President, Management, Red Hat at the time of the acquisition, was quoted as saying:

"Ansible is a clear leader in IT automation and DevOps, and helps Red Hat take a significant step forward in our goal of creating frictionless IT."

During the course of this book, you will find that the statement in the original README file and Red Hat's statement at the time of acquiring Ansible both still ring true.

Before we look at rolling our sleeves up and installing Ansible, which we will be doing in the next chapter, we should look at some of the core concepts surrounding it.