On-topic questions are concerned with the use of the tool itself. Installing Ansible and prerequisites, connection issues, ... are off-topic. Red Hat Ansible is a model-driven, configuration management, multi-node deployment/orchestration and remote task execution system. It uses SSH by default, so there is no special software to be installed on the nodes you manage. Ansible is written in Python but can be extended in any language.
Red Hat® Ansible® is a model-driven, configuration management, multi-node deployment/orchestration and remote task execution system. It uses SSH and Python by default, so there is no special software to be installed on the nodes you manage. Simply, it is an agentless configuration management tool. Ansible can be extended in any language, as long as the modules can process and respond with JSON.
The biggest advantage of Ansible over other configuration management technologies is, it is agent-less, i.e., no clients need to be installed, which avoids the chicken and egg problem.
The name "ansible" is taken from the science fiction concept of a machine capable of instantaneous or superluminal communication.
While only a Linux node can be used as a control machine, it remains nonetheless possible to have Windows nodes as a target into Ansible.
Ansible capabilities have gained a lot of modules to cover Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, and Service as a Service.
Ansible is also capable of interacting with a lot of network equipment like Cisco IOS, Juniper Junos or F5 Bigip.
Ansible has two major products,
Ansible Engine - Easily and quickly deploy IT services, applications and environments, remove barriers between IT teams by automating routine activities.
Ansible Tower - With Red Hat® Ansible® Tower you can centralize and control your IT infrastructure with a visual dashboard, role-based access control, job scheduling, integrated notifications and graphical inventory management. Easily embed Ansible Tower into existing tools and processes with REST API and CLI.
