Ansible is designed as the simplest deployment tool that actually works. What that means is that it’s not a full programming language. You write YAML templates that define tasks and list whatever tasks you need to automate your job.
Most people think of Ansible as a souped-up version of “SSH in a ‘for’ loop,” and that’s true for simple use cases. But really Ansible is about tasks, not about SSH. For a lot of use cases, we connect via SSH but also support things like Windows Remote Management (WinRM) for Windows machines, different protocols for network devices, and the HTTPS APIs that are the lingua franca of cloud services.
In a cloud, Ansible can operate on two separate layers: the control plane and the on-instance resources. The control plane consists of everything not running on the OS.
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