Ricardo Schmidt gave a presentation on Ansible, an open source tool for configuration management, application deployment, provisioning, and orchestration. He explained that Ansible is fast, clear, complete, and secure. It uses SSH to connect to nodes agentlessly without requiring additional firewall rules or open ports. Key components include the inventory to define hosts and groups, modules to run tasks on nodes, and playbooks to orchestrate tasks across multiple hosts. The presentation demonstrated Ansible's capabilities through examples and a demo of its core features.