Ansible is an automation tool aimed at provisioning systems, managing configuration and deploying applications on large fleets of machines. Although very powerful, conceptually it is dead simple: it is invoked on a control node that executes commands via SSH on the server fleet.

I have used Ansible to manage bare metal servers and long-running VMs. I have written and maintained existing Ansible roles and shared them on Ansible Galaxy. Ansible Molecule was of great help for making sure that roles would work on all intended target systems before deploying them.