@tiyip has been done a wonderful job designing the new community website so I asked her if she’d also mind revamping the basic Ansible graphic in the getting started docs. Full confession, I created the original in Inkscape but am not really the person you want to design graphics. So I was keen to get someone with Tina’s talents to improve that part of the docs. After all, it’s intended for first-time Ansible users so we want to make a good impression.
Tina and I have gone through a couple of iterations of the new graphic and wanted to open this up to opinions here. This is what we’ve got so far. Let us know what you think!
Should that be “Ansible”, or “ansible-playbook” in the first box?
At the risk of feature creep, this feels to me like the 2nd diagram in a series:
The first would be ansible-playbook with no inventory running on and managing localhost. It’s all in one box.
Then this diagram (which, btw, seems fine to me, to address your question).
Then one showing an [SCM node], [AWX with internal organizations], [external inventory sources], and [managed nodes]. (The square brackets are supposed to imply possible boxes.)
I’m thinking a newbie could scroll through and at a glance — literally — get a sense of how ansible deployments might scale.
Hey @utoddl thanks for that suggestion. I like it a lot. Yeah it might be somewhat of a scope creep from the initial ask but getting a visual sense of how deployments scale could really help click things into place for newbies. (Full confession I still consider myself a newbie in comparison with lots of others around here.)
That will take a bit of rewriting / finessing in the “Getting started with Ansible” content itself but I can try and come up with something.
+1 - I fear that adding too much to this image would be scope creep.
I think initially just running the command ansible for an ad-hoc task to demonstrate how to combine it with an inventory to perform a single task is a powerful moment that then leads the new user to the obvious next step of “how do I combine these tasks so I don’t have to keep running commands?” and that answer is Playbooks!
I would think Ansible + Inventory + Playbook could be another graphic, perhaps the same graphic with some added elements to illustrate the building block concepts.
I like the new design! I would keep the managed in the small boxes as well, when starting it’s good to have refreshers and it’s not making it too noisy.
between Ansible and Inventory to make it clear you combine these two things to do magic? 
