[awesomeMilou]

> Maybe I need an explanation “like I’m just a programmer/sysadmin and I need to use boring terms years old”

The issue is, Ansible was written for sysadmins who aren't programmers. There is no good explanation, other than it's a historically grown, syntactic and semantic mess that should've been barebones python from the get go.

It is not idempotent. For example, how can I revert a task/play when it fails, so that my infra doesn't end up in an unknown state? How do I deal with inevitable side effects that come from setting up infra?

People will now refer you to Terraform but that is imo a cop out from tool developers that would much rather sell you expensive solutions to get error handling in Ansible (namely RedHat's Ansible Automation platform) than have it be part of a language.

But to give you a proper explanation: Plays define arrays of tasks, tasks being calls to small python code snippets called modules (such as ansible.builtin.file or ansible.builtin.copy). To facilitate reuse, common "flows" (beware, flow is not part of their terminology) of tasks are encapsulated into reusable roles, although reusability depends on the skill of the author of the role.