3 years ago

Ansible works against multiple systems in your infrastructure by selecting portions of Ansible’s inventory, stored as edit-able, version-able ASCII text files. Not only is this inventory configurable, but you can also use multiple inventory files at the same time and pull inventory from dynamic or cloud sources or different formats (YAML, INI, etc).. Any machine with Ansible utilities installed can leverage a set of files/directories to orchestrate other nodes.

In contrast with other popular configuration-management software — such as Chef, Puppet, and CFEngine — Ansible uses an agentless architecture, with Ansible software not normally running or even installed on the controlled node.

Since Ansible is an agent-less tool, it only needs to be installed in the controller node.