Ansible
An agentless automation tool for configuration management, application deployment, and orchestration. Uses YAML playbooks and connects over SSH.
What is Ansible?
An agentless automation tool for configuration management, application deployment, and orchestration. Uses YAML playbooks and connects over SSH.
Ansible is a intermediate-level concept that sits in the Cloud Infrastructure area of system design. Engineers reach for it whenever they need to reason about real-world trade-offs in that space — not just for textbook correctness, but because real production systems at companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Google make these decisions every day.
If you want to go deeper than this definition — with diagrams, code, and a quiz to lock it in — work through the "Ansible" lesson linked below. It walks through the why, the mechanism, the trade-offs, and how the giants actually use it in production.
Learn Ansible in depth
Full interactive lesson with diagrams, code examples, real-world references, and a quiz.
Open the Ansible lessonRelated lessons
Lessons that touch on Ansible as part of a larger topic.
See also
Related glossary terms you might want to look up next.
Terraform
An open-source IaC tool by HashiCorp that provisions infrastructure across any cloud provider using declarative HCL configuration. Plan, apply, destroy.
Infrastructure as Code
Managing servers, networks, and cloud resources through declarative configuration files instead of manual setup. Terraform, Pulumi, and CloudFormation are IaC tools.
CI/CD
Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment: automating the process of testing and deploying code. Push code, tests run, and it ships to production automatically.