Ansible is yet another configuration management tool that is mostly used on Linux but also has support for Windows. One aspect that differentiates Ansible from other tools is that it does not have a centralized server that hosts all of the desired states, nor does it work with agents. All commands executed by Ansible are executed using SSH.

Any server can initiate the deployment of a playbook against one or more items in an inventory. An Ansible inventory contains all of the servers that can be managed by Ansible. They can be grouped into one or more groups, which can be nested into other groups as well. Each individual server and every group is an inventory item. In Ansible, the desired state is written in playbooks. A playbook is a series of tasks or roles that need to be run at the target server. A role is a group of tasks. Roles are intended to be reused in more than one playbook and should, therefore, be general enough to be useable in multiple situations. Roles should also be idempotent. This means that the tasks in the role should ensure that the outcome of running the playbook is the same, no matter the number of times it is run.

Ansible scripts can be executed using command-line tools or an Azure DevOps extension that wraps this tool. There are also other management systems available, such as Ansible Tower, that provide a graphical user interface on top of the capabilities of the Ansible command-line tools.