I have been learning some new technologies for automatization of workflow. On some projects I saw people using Rakefiles. I have learned that they are used to automate the deployment/workflow etc. On others, I saw people using Ansible. Maybe I am misunderstanding one of those technologies, but how do they differ?
Rake is a tool most often used for administrative tasks that can be scripted for an application whether that be database migrations, data loading, export/import of data, clearing caches, etc. Ansible is a provisioning tool it can configure a server, and do application deployment. You could conceivably use rake to do some of what Ansible does and vice versa, but if you were to try to recreate Ansible in a rake utility you'd be re-inventing the wheel. The closer equivalent to Anisble in the ruby/rails world is Capistrano. However, Ansible is a more generically applicable tool and Capistrano is more a specialty tool for rails applications (IMO).