Automation platform for configuration management, application deployment, and task automation. Like having a universal remote control for managing all your servers.
System administrators use Ansible to install software updates across hundreds of servers simultaneously.
Ansible is not a cloud-provider-native service; it’s an open-source automation tool (by Red Hat) that can manage resources across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, OCI, and on-prem. Cloud providers offer adjacent services (e.g., AWS Systems Manager, Azure Automation, Google Cloud OS Config) that overlap in patching/config management, but they are not direct equivalents to Ansible’s agentless, playbook-driven automation across heterogeneous environments.