The Ansible Architecture

Ansible was created with an incredibly flexible and scalable automation engine. It allows users to leverage it in many diverse ways and can be adapted to be used in the way that best suits your specific needs. Since Ansible is agentless (meaning there is no permanently running daemon on the systems it manages or executes from), it can be used locally to control a single system (without any network connectivity) or leveraged to orchestrate and execute automation against many systems, via a control server.

In addition to the aforementioned architectures, Ansible can also be leveraged via Vagrant or Docker to provision infrastructure automatically. This type of solution basically allows Ansible users to bootstrap their hardware or infrastructure provisioning by running one or more Ansible playbooks.

As we mentioned briefly, Ansible is open source, module-based, pluggable, and agentless. These key differentiators from other Configuration Management solutions give Ansible a significant edge. Let's take a look at each of these differentiators in detail and see what it actually means for Ansible developers and users.