Getting started with Ansible

Overview on Ansible

In one liner "Ansible is a super-simple automation platform that is agentless and extensible."
It is an open source tool (with enterprise editions available) developed using Python and runs on Windows, Mac, and UNIX-like systems.
Ansible is an orchestration engine in IT, which can be used for several use cases.
Compared to other automation tools, Ansible brings you an easy way to configure your orchestration engine without the overhead of a client or central server setup.
Another great feature is that Ansible is agentless.
It uses SSH, so we don't have to prepare and install something before we start.
It comes preloaded with a wide range of modules that make your life simpler.

Ansible has certain distinct advantages over other similar tools.

Ansible is agentless. So we do not need to install any software on the servers that are to be managed. It does require Python runtime on the servers and a SSH server on remote hosts.
Ansible supports both push and pull modes. So we can execute Ansible code from a central control machine to make changes on remote machines or the remote machines can pull configuration from a well defined source periodically.
Code for Ansible is written in YAML (http://yaml.org/), which stands for YAML Ain't Markup Language.
Ansible does not try to re-invent the wheel. Hence it uses SSH as a transport and YAML as a Domain Specific Language (DSL).