Ansible
by ansible
Agentless Infrastructure Automation with Human-Readable Playbooks
Orchestrate servers, networks, and cloud resources using declarative YAML playbooks over SSH—no remote agents required.
- 67,728+ GitHub stars
- Built with Python
- Agentless architecture using SSH—no daemons to install or maintain on managed nodes
- GNU General Public License v3.0 license
About This Project
Ansible transforms infrastructure management by letting you describe desired system states in simple YAML files called playbooks. Unlike traditional configuration management tools, it requires zero software installation on target machines—just SSH access and Python. This agentless architecture eliminates maintenance overhead while providing powerful orchestration capabilities across thousands of nodes simultaneously.
The platform shines in its idempotent execution model, meaning you can safely run the same playbook multiple times without causing unintended changes. Built-in modules cover everything from package installation and file management to cloud provisioning and container orchestration. The extensive Galaxy community repository offers thousands of pre-built roles, allowing you to leverage proven automation patterns instead of building from scratch.
What sets Ansible apart is its gentle learning curve combined with enterprise-grade power. Beginners can automate basic tasks within hours, while advanced users can create complex multi-tier deployments with rolling updates, conditional logic, and dynamic inventories. Integration with CI/CD pipelines, version control workflows, and infrastructure-as-code practices makes it a cornerstone tool for DevOps teams seeking reproducible, auditable infrastructure changes.
Key Features
- Agentless architecture using SSH—no daemons to install or maintain on managed nodes
- Human-readable YAML syntax that serves as executable documentation
- Idempotent operations ensuring consistent results across repeated executions
- Over 3,000 built-in modules for systems, cloud, networking, and containers
- Dynamic inventory support for auto-discovering infrastructure from cloud providers
- Ansible Galaxy community hub with thousands of reusable roles and collections
- Built-in parallelism for managing hundreds of servers simultaneously
- Vault encryption for secure credential and sensitive data management
How You Can Use It
Provisioning and configuring web servers across multiple environments (dev, staging, production)
Automating application deployments with zero-downtime rolling updates
Managing network device configurations for routers, switches, and firewalls
Orchestrating cloud infrastructure on AWS, Azure, GCP, or private clouds
Enforcing security compliance policies across server fleets
Automating disaster recovery procedures and backup routines
Who Is This For?
DevOps engineers, system administrators, site reliability engineers, and infrastructure teams managing multi-server environments