Is Ansible commonly used in DevOps?

Yes, Ansible is one of the most widely used tools in DevOps for configuration management and deployment automation, and it has held that position since Red Hat acquired the project in 2015 for a reported $150 million.

Where does Ansible sit in a typical DevOps toolchain?

Most teams reach for it after provisioning is already done: once servers, VMs, or cloud instances exist, Ansible installs packages, writes configuration files, and keeps a fleet of machines in a known, repeatable state. It's commonly paired with a tool like Terraform for the initial infrastructure provisioning and a CI server for the pipeline that triggers the playbook run, rather than replacing either one. The broader configuration-management software market was valued at roughly $14.8 billion in 2025, and Ansible is consistently named alongside Puppet and Chef as one of the category's most used open source tools.

Why do DevOps teams prefer it over older configuration tools?

Ansible pushes configuration over plain SSH instead of requiring an agent daemon installed and kept updated on every managed server, which removes an entire category of maintenance that older agent-based tools carry. Playbooks are written in YAML rather than a dedicated domain-specific language, so operations engineers without a heavy programming background can usually read and modify one without a steep learning curve.

What does that look like day to day?

In practice this means playbooks that patch a fleet of Linux servers, roll out an application release across staging and production, or configure cloud resources and network gear from vendors like AWS, Azure, Cisco, or Juniper through the same YAML syntax. Red Hat also sells a commercial layer on top of the open source project, Ansible Automation Platform, aimed at larger organizations that want centralized job scheduling and role-based access control.

Updated: August 12, 2026