Ansible is a very powerful open source automation language. What makes it unique from other management tools, is that it is also a deployment and orchestration tool. In many respects, it aims to provide large productivity gains to a wide variety of automation challenges.

One of these challenges is to enable continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) with zero downtime. This goal has often required extensive custom coding, working with multiple software packages, and lots of in-house-developed glue to achieve success. Ansible provides all of these capabilities in one composition, being designed from the beginning to orchestrate exactly these types of scenarios.