Wow, it’s been a little over a month and things are taking off nicely.
I think the thing I’m most happy about is this: https://github.com/ansible/ansible/graphs/impact … this last week, we’ve had about 8 contributors, and everybody’s doing a pretty sizable amount of work! This has definitely turned away from being a lone wolf project into a community effort, and quick. Thanks everyone for that. I think part of our success is going to be keeping things incredibly simple and easy to contribute to, and everyone is doing
an amazing job at that so far. The quality of patches we’ve been getting have been off the charts.
Growth is also really good for a project this young. We’ve had a couple of several thousand or two hit days on Reddit and Hacker News, and I’m probably going to rely more on word of mouth for getting this tool into more hands – sharing with LUGs, conferences, and so forth is quite welcome. I’m probably in need of developing a good online presentation soon. I would like to know more about who’s using Ansible though, so if you’d like to talk about your use cases and organization, I promise to keep that confidential – but it would be very helpful to know more about some of the users and use cases. (We’ll probably start a “who’s using Ansible” page a bit later on where people can opt in on sharing logos and so forth if they want)
Our issues list is nicely under control now – see https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues – please open tickets on anything you see that’s a problem, but right now we’re mostly full of feature requests and just a couple of minor issues. If folks would like to help attack these, you are welcome to do so, maybe comment on them before you start so two people don’t end up racing at the same ticket. That’s happened a few times already! 
Remote sudo support is new and still needs testing – please fire away and let me know how things are working for you, it may need some more debug work. As a reminder, this is accessed with --sudo from /usr/bin/ansible (also specify -u user), OR by changing the “user:” line in a playbook and specifying “sudo: True”. Similarly, we’ve squared off with some older/newer versions of paramiko recently – these should all be fixed in the latest git, ideally even WITHOUT upgrading paramiko. If anyone is seeing any problems, please yell… but we should be solid.
I haven’t heard too much on docs feedback, I’m generally going to assume that means they are good, but I’m a bit blind to knowing the application really well at this point. Please do share feedback with me on docs and feel free to submit patches to the “rst/” files (the docs project source) at https://github.com/ansible/ansible.github.com
Recent commits have greatly expanded the module support, as witnessed by http://ansible.github.com/modules.html … in particular, the users/groups module are EXCEPTIONALLY well featured now. As with sudo, all of these modules could benefit from user testing and comments. I would almost say we have almost every module most people will need. Some modules can probably be fleshed out more – if you are using the git module for deployment, in particular, I’m sure it could be upgraded. I think our apt module doesn’t support “version=latest” just yet either. Etc. These should be incredibly easy
things if people are looking for a way to dive in and work with modules, but don’t yet want to start a new one.
I think we have a reasonably large amount of people using playbooks now, which is great. I’d like to start taking some of the examples for generally useful playbooks to include in the examples dir, to show people some more real life examples. Let me know if you have any that you would like to make available for that purpose.
Upcoming plans? Mostly getting the issues list down to 0 and making the earlier modules a bit more consistent with regards to implementation (using the fail_json functions, etc). It’s my external brain at this point – I also have some things I need to do for the documentation purposes so I’ll probably focus on that for a while (BTW, did I mention people need to test sudo?).
So yeah, it has been a GREAT start for Ansible… please keep me in the loop with how it’s working out with you and thanks everyone for all of their feedback, code, testing, and helping to spread the word.
–Michael