The two things that came into my mind when I first used Ansible was "bash" and "hudson/jenkins". It seems like a tool which was written by an ops person (as in

The two things that came into my mind when I first used Ansible was "bash" and "hudson/jenkins". It seems like a tool which was written by an ops person (as in hacked together) for ops people (who don't mind stuff being hacked together), specifically for replacing manually distributed cryptic bash files. It's an improvement over that, for sure, but that's it.