Ansible is probably the single most useful tool for doing working with servers today. It somehow manages to be simple and very featureful at the same time. Personally, a good chunk of my effectiveness in workings with servers and cloud provisioning can be directly attributed to it.<p>I&#x27;ve been using pre-releases of 2.0 for a few months now, mainly for its improved support for AWS services like dynamodb and IAM policies. I&#x27;ve had nothing but good experience with the new version, which cleans up the code and brings more consistency. Working with AWS, ansible shows its strengths by exposing to the developer a simplified API which gets you 95% percent of the way -- pretty much what you wish you&#x27;d get from Amazon. I feel that ansible does cloud provisioning not just easier but better than most other tools, including Amazon&#x27;s Cloud Formation.<p>Ansible&#x27;s playbooks (recipes for provisioning servers or infrastructure) read like pseudo-code, and although it&#x27;s sometime not obvious how to write an idempotent playbook for a piece of software, it is always obvious what an ansible YAML file does (despite the obvious shortcomings of YAML for this job). This is important in the devops world: all knowledge about the infrastructure is codified in version-controlled ansible code and doesn&#x27;t get lost when the job passes to a new hire.<p>This also means that you can often find a playbook for software you want to deploy already written on github (search with &quot;language:yaml&quot;). Often you won&#x27;t be able to copy and paste it verbatim, but looking at how someone else has solved a problem (install java, configure apache, etc.), it will be obvious how to replicate it.<p>Every time I finish a piece ansible code, I smile -- about how many other tools can you say that? Congratulations to the team and all contributors for the new major release (and to the company for its well-deserved recent acquisition)!