Ansible is an open source IT automation engine that automates provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, orchestration, and many other IT processes.

Use Ansible automation to install software, automate daily tasks, provision infrastructure, improve security and compliance, patch systems, and share automation across your organization.

Modules
Ansible works by connecting to your nodes and pushing out small programs—called modules—to these nodes. Modules are used to accomplish automation tasks in Ansible. These programs are written to be resource models of the desired state of the system. Ansible then executes these modules and removes them when finished.

Without modules, you’d have to rely on ad-hoc commands and scripting to accomplish tasks. Ansible can be installed on Red Hat® Enterprise Linux®, CentOS, or Fedora; Ubuntu; Debian; and many other operating systems.

Ansible contains built-in modules that you can use to automate tasks, or you can write your own. Ansible modules can be written in any language that can return JSON, such as Ruby, Python, or bash. Windows automation modules are even written in Powershell.