I've written about and trained folks on various DevOps tools through the years, and although they're awesome, it's obvious that most of them are designed from the mind of a developer. There's nothing wrong with that, because approaching configuration management programmatically is the whole point. Still, it wasn't until I started playing with Ansible that I felt like it was something a sysadmin quickly would appreciate.

Part of that appreciation comes from the way Ansible communicates with its client computers—namely, via SSH. As sysadmins, you're all very familiar with connecting to computers via SSH, so right from the word "go", you have a better understanding of Ansible than the other alternatives.