Ansible uses the concept of 'playbooks' to automate cloud infrastructure provisioning and management. It is known for not requiring remote agents and for using SSH for communication with the managed nodes. Playbooks are simple YAML files that describe the desired state of the infrastructure, making Ansible an agentless tool in contrast to other automation tools that may require agent installation on nodes. Chef, however, uses 'recipes' and 'cookbooks' and typically requires a client (agent) installed on managed nodes. Terraform is not typically described in terms of 'playbooks' but rather in terms of 'configuration files' or 'templates'.