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Ansible

Ansible is an agentless automation tool for configuring servers and deploying software, maintained by Red Hat (part of IBM). It's the #24 most-used developer tool, reported in roughly 11.7% of developer surveys. It uses simple YAML "playbooks" to describe the desired state of a fleet of machines, then pushes changes over plain SSH — with no agent software to install or maintain on the target machines, unlike competitors such as Puppet or Chef.

Quick facts
Type: Configuration management & automation
Made by: Red Hat (IBM)
License: Free / open-source core (GPLv3), paid Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
Platforms/Hosting: Agentless (SSH-based), cross-platform control node
Primary use case: Automating server configuration, provisioning, and application deployment

Jump to: Example Getting started Best for

Example

An Ansible playbook is plain YAML describing tasks to run on a group of hosts — here it installs and starts nginx on all web servers.

# site.yml
- hosts: webservers
  become: true
  tasks:
    - name: Install nginx
      apt:
        name: nginx
        state: present
        update_cache: true

    - name: Ensure nginx is running
      service:
        name: nginx
        state: started
        enabled: true

Getting started

Install Ansible on a single control machine — it only needs SSH access to target servers, no agent to deploy anywhere.

# install via pip
pip install ansible

# run a playbook against an inventory of hosts
ansible-playbook -i inventory.ini site.yml

Best for: Ops teams managing a fleet of Linux servers who want automation without deploying and maintaining an agent on every machine — its low barrier to entry also makes it a common first infrastructure-as-code tool for smaller teams.