Ansible is an open source project started in early 2012 that quickly became one of the most popular automation projects on GitHub. It did this because it was very simple and easy to use, and concentrated on the way teams use tools and share information. Written by a software software developer well versed in IT automation, and very much wanting to get done with his own automation projects as quickly as possible -- The goal of Ansible is for people to get in, get out, and move on to performing other business critical tasks. Ansible seeks to be transparent and simple, but flexible enough for all kinds of IT tasks. Ansible is somewhat unique in that it requires no additional software to be installed on remote machines -- it can start managing machines instantly, just using SSH, which gives it some very appealing security and management properties. This talk will detail how the changing landscape of computing requires new approaches to IT automation, and will show how to use Ansible to automate many of these types of problem spaces -- including deployment of applications (Python and otherwise), configuration management, and general purpose process workflow orchestration. In particular, we'll give some examples of how to achieve zero-downtime rolling updates of web applications, as well as configure multi-tier application topologies with a minimum of hassle. Another key focus of this talk is extensibility -- we'll go into how to write new Ansible modules in Python, as well as how to extend it with a wide variety of plugins.