With the rapid growth of IT infrastructures and a shift in the way applications are being deployed, IT administrators' tasks have grown in scale and complexity. Ansible seamlessly merges orchestration and configuration management in a very handy platform that allows IT administrators to define a selected number of nodes, applications, and network devices to be configured in a desired state by making clear which actions should be taken to remove repetition and reduce complexity. Ansible can be used in a variety of ways, which we will cover in the next section.