A company owns a large-scale compute infrastructure that consists of over 1000 servers and virtual machines. The operational complexity continues to grow with additional policies and servers added to

Puppet is an agent-based configuration management tool, requiring agents to be installed on managed nodes, which contradicts the agentless requirement.

Cisco NSO (Network Services Orchestrator) is primarily focused on network device automation and orchestration, not general compute infrastructure automation, and is not typically described as agentless in the same context as Ansible for server management.

SaltStack is an agent-based configuration management tool (using 'Salt Minions') by default; while agentless modes exist, its primary design is agent-based, which does not strictly meet the agentless requirement.

Ansible is an agentless automation engine that uses SSH for secure transport to managed nodes, which is suitable for environments with strict security requirements. Its Python-based architecture and extensive module library make it highly extensible, fulfilling all specified requirements for large-scale infrastructure automation.