Theory

Ansible is an agentless, push-based automation system that makes it easy to provision, configure, and orchestrate applications using simple, human-readable YAML playbooks. It drives systems over SSH or WinRM, running idempotent, task scripts composed of modules. Key concepts include inventory (list of hosts), modules (scripted tasks), roles (persistent structures), variables (user-provided values), facts (learned system attributes), and handlers (triggering actions). Perfect for both short ad-hoc commands and sophisticated workflows, Ansible provides consistency across systems with little setup, backed by a rich ecosystem such as Ansible Galaxy.