The main selling points for Ansible and similar tools is that its automated, reproducible and can be audited via version control. In a typical cloud deployment

The main selling points for Ansible and similar tools is that its automated, reproducible and can be audited via version control. In a typical cloud deployment, you can have many servers and you need to quickly configure them and deploy software. Doing it manually through SSH may not scale and can be error prone. So, automation helps and as a bonus you get to leverage existing expertise. While many of the ready made scripts do get the work done for standard tasks, I've seen lot of custom scripts depending on the environment and business needs. So, its a mix.