Ansible is an open-source software provisioning, configuration management, and deployment tool. It runs on many Unix-like systems and can configure both Unix-like systems as well as Microsoft Windows. Ansible uses SSH protocol in order to configure the remote servers. Ansible follows the push-based mechanism to configure the remote servers.

Ansible is an automation tool that provides a way to define infrastructure as code. Ansible can be used to provide the underlying infrastructure of your environment, virtualized hosts and hypervisors, network devices, and bare metal servers.

Features of Ansible

. Ansible manages machines in an agent-less manner using SSH

. Built on top of Python and hence provides a lot of Python’s functionality.

. YAML based playbooks.

. Uses SSH for secure connections.

. Follows push-based architecture for sending configuration related notifications.