Home > Storage > PowerMax and VMAX > Storage Admin > Dell PowerMax: Ansible Modules Best Practices > Idempotency and Ansible
Ansible is a declarative state engine at its core. Through tasks, playbooks describe the state to which the system is to be configured. The logic behind the modules run by the playbook tasks works to achieve the specified state.
A key principle of Ansible that makes it different from scripting is the concept of idempotency. The official Ansible documentation describes idempotency as follows: “An operation is idempotent if the result of performing it once is exactly the same as the result of performing it repeatedly without any intervening actions.” This means that if you run a playbook with the same set of inputs, you should not expect it to make any changes on the system. Ansible modules for PowerMax (and other Dell storage arrays) are written to conform with this type of idempotency.