What is Ansible? Ansible is an open source automation tool, which facilitates configuration management, application deployment and task automation. A complex multi-step process can be automated and run with a simple command from your workstation: ansible-playbook task.yml. A key word for Ansible is ‘ensure’. Ansible will work to ensure that configuration / tasks are run. If a task completes without changing any settings, it is ‘ok’. Otherwise, it was ‘changed’ or sometimes ‘failed’ (which is not always a Bad Thing™)