Introduction

Ansible is an easy-to-use agentless system configuration management tool. It allows us to deploy complex configurations without the hassle of a complex interface or language.

Ansible uses playbooks, which are collections of tasks to deploy configurations and applications to multiple nodes over SSH in a controlled way. However, it doesn't stop there.

Ansible's modules, which are used to execute tasks, are all built to be idempotent in their execution.

The definition of Idempotence, according to Wikipedia, is as follows:

Idempotence (/ˌaɪdɨmˈpoʊtəns/ eye-dəm-poh-təns [citation needed]) is the property of certain operations in mathematics and computer science that can be applied multiple times without changing the result beyond the initial application.

In short, any module will detect the changes to be applied and perform them. If it doesn't need to change anything, it will not reapply the requested changes or interfere with file metadata.

The Ansible company also provides Tower, a paid...