This article will be preaching to the converted for many of you, but I still see so many folks still doing manual installs and shell scripts even for large companies that I felt I needed to try and convert a few more folks over to saner systems.

Fortunately Ansible has dramatically lowered the learning curve and now is a great time to make the switch. So, if you have friends that need an "intervention" from their manual installs, hopefully this will help you make your case to them :)

Of course there are many great config mgmt tools out there. I singled out Ansible because it's so simple to get started with and I've found that the learning curve is usually the biggest hurdle to adoption.