Home > Servers > Systems Management > White Papers > Dell PowerEdge: Getting Started with Redfish Ansible Modules > 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 that are 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.” Thus, if you run a playbook with the same set of inputs, you should not expect it to make any changes on the system. Dell modules for OpenManage (and other Dell Technologies products) are written to conform with this type of idempotency.