Automating Everything With Ansible
Open Source For You, Tuesday, October 20th, 2026
A practical walkthrough of Ansible's agentless architecture, inventories, playbooks and modules for configuration management.
This primer explains how Ansible, created by Michael DeHaan and now part of Red Hat's Ansible Automation Platform, automates deployment and configuration.
It is agentless: the control node connects over SSH or WinRM, copies modules to managed nodes, runs them and removes them, so managed nodes need only SSH and Python.
Inventories, YAML playbooks, modules and plugins all live on the control node.
The article covers rolling updates and continuous deployment and explains why the design keeps maintenance costs low across an enterprise.