In the beginning, there were sysadmins

Ansible is a radically simple IT automation platform that makes your applications and systems easier to deploy.

Avoid writing scripts or custom code to deploy and update your applications - automate in a language that approaches plain English, using SSH, with no agents to install on remote systems.

As data centers grew, and hosted applications became more complex, administrators realized they couldn't scale their manual systems management as fast as the applications they were enabling. That's why server provisioning and configuration management tools came to flourish.