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.

I'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'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'd get from Amazon. I feel that ansible does cloud provisioning not just easier but better than most other tools, including Amazon's Cloud Formation.

Ansible's playbooks (recipes for provisioning servers or infrastructure) read like pseudo-code, and although it'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't get lost when the job passes to a new hire.

This also means that you can often find a playbook for software you want to deploy already written on github (search with "language:yaml"). Often you won'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.

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)!