Ansible

Ansible is a radically simple IT automation system. It handles configuration-management, application deployment, cloud provisioning, ad-hoc task-execution, and multinode orchestration - including trivializing things like zero downtime rolling updates with load balancers.

Read the documentation and more at https://ansible.com/

Many users run straight from the development branch (it's generally fine to do so), but you might also wish to consume a release.

You can find instructions here for a variety of platforms.

Design Principles

Have a dead simple setup process and a minimal learning curve
Manage machines very quickly and in parallel
Avoid custom-agents and additional open ports, be agentless by leveraging the existing SSH daemon
Describe infrastructure in a language that is both machine and human friendly
Focus on security and easy auditability/review/rewriting of content
Manage new remote machines instantly, without bootstrapping any software
Allow module development in any dynamic language, not just Python
Be usable as non-root
Be the easiest IT automation system to use, ever.

Get Involved

Read Community Information for all kinds of ways to contribute to and interact with the project, including mailing list information and how to submit bug reports and code to Ansible.
All code submissions are done through pull requests. Take care to make sure no merge commits are in the submission, and use git rebase vs git merge for this reason. If submitting a large code change (other than modules), it's probably a good idea to join ansible-devel and talk about what you would like to do or add first and to avoid duplicate efforts. This not only helps everyone know what's going on, it also helps save time and effort if we decide some changes are needed.
Users list: ansible-project
Development list: ansible-devel
Announcement list: ansible-announce - read only
irc.freenode.net: #ansible

Branch Info

Releases are named after Led Zeppelin songs. (Releases prior to 2.0 were named after Van Halen songs.)
The devel branch corresponds to the release actively under development.
For releases 1.8 - 2.2, modules are kept in different repos, you'll want to follow core and extras
Various release-X.Y branches exist for previous releases.
We'd love to have your contributions, read Community Information for notes on how to get started.