Ansible is an open-source IT automation tool developed by Red Hat. It automates various IT tasks, such as configuration management, application deployment, orchestration, and task automation.

Ansible Vault is a feature of Ansible that enables you to encrypt sensitive data, such as passwords or keys, in encrypted files instead of plaintext.

Ansible Vault works with private keys stored in hardware security modules (HSMs), which helps to prevent the disclosure of the keys and enables the secure usage of private keys to perform various functions.

With this integration, you can securely reference your private key stored in to perform automated encryption and decryption tasks with Ansible Playbooks by using the PKCS #11 library and OpenSSL.