Ansible is an automation tool or platform, which is available as open source, and used to configure devices such as routers, switches, and various types of servers. Ansible's primary purpose is to configure three main type of tasks:

• Configuration management: This is used to fetch and push configs on various devices that we call as inventory in Ansible. Based upon the type of inventory, Ansible is capable of pushing in bulk specific or full configs.
• Application deployment: In server scenarios, many a time we need to bulk deploy some specific applications or patches. Ansible takes care of that as well as bulk uploading patches or applications on the server, installing on them, and even configuring the applications of a particular task. Ansible can also take care of customizing settings based upon the devices in the inventory.
• Task automation: This is a feature of Ansible that performs a certain written task on a single device or a group of devices. The tasks can be written and Ansible can be configured to run those tasks once or on a periodic basis.

Another powerful feature of Ansible is IT or infrastructure orchestration. To explain this in detail, let us say we need to code upgrade certain routers or network devices. Ansible can perform sequential steps to isolate the particular router, push code, update code, and then move on to next router based upon the return values of the previous result or task.