Ansible is the agentless configuration-management and automation tool originally built by Michael DeHaan, now owned by Red Hat. Used widely at NASA, Verizon, and most enterprise Linux fleets.
Source: GitHub · fetched 2026-04-17
Ansible is a configuration-management and automation tool released in 2012 by Michael DeHaan and acquired by Red Hat in 2015. It is GPLv3 licensed and distinguishes itself from Chef and Puppet by being agentless—it connects over SSH (or WinRM for Windows), executes Python modules on the target, and requires no resident daemon.
Playbooks are YAML, which kept the learning curve low and helped Ansible become the default choice for configuring Linux fleets, running ad-hoc operations, and automating network devices. Red Hat's commercial product, Ansible Automation Platform (formerly Tower/AWX), adds RBAC, credential management, a UI, and an event-driven execution layer. Ansible is still the first tool many SREs reach for when they need to run the same command across 500 hosts.
Ansible is used at NASA, Verizon, Capital One, Cisco, Juniper, and most large enterprises with non-trivial Linux fleets. Network teams at major telcos and ISPs use it for device automation. It is near-universal at Red Hat Enterprise Linux shops and deeply embedded in federal and defense IT.
Ansible users are primarily sysadmins, SREs, DevOps engineers, and network engineers. These roles buy monitoring, patching, vulnerability scanning, RMM platforms, configuration-drift tooling, and PAM/secrets-management—the classic IT-ops stack that overlaps with both SaaS and on-prem infrastructure tools.
According to the Ansible README: “Ansible is a radically simple IT automation system.” (source)
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Ansible is used in production at Red Hat, NASA, LinkedIn, AT&T, and thousands of enterprise IT teams.
Red Hat (an IBM company), which acquired Ansible in 2015 and funds the core development team. The project is governed through open contribution on GitHub and the ansible-community organization.
Chef, Puppet, SaltStack (for configuration management), and Terraform/OpenTofu (for infrastructure provisioning). For container environments, Kubernetes Operators and Helm charts cover much of what Ansible playbooks handle in VM-based setups.
Ansible has 6,936 contributors (GitHub, 2026/04). It is one of the more actively contributed open-source projects in its category, with contributions from both individual developers and corporate engineering teams.
Yes. Ansible is production-ready: it has 68.4k GitHub stars, 6,936 contributors (GitHub, 2026/04), and is last released Apr 2026. It is used in production at large-scale organizations and has a mature release cadence.
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