Full Stack Developer
HashiCorp Terraform is an open-source infrastructure as code (IaC) software tool that allows DevOps engineers to programmatically provision the physical resources an application requires to run.
Infrastructure as code is an IT practice that manages an application's underlying IT infrastructure through programming. This approach to resource allocation allows developers to logically manage, monitor, and provision resources -- as opposed to requiring that an operations team manually configure each required resource. Terraform is a tool for building, changing, and versioning infrastructure safely and efficiently. Terraform can help with multi-cloud by having one workflow for all clouds. The infrastructure Terraform manages can be hosted on public clouds like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, or on-prem in private clouds such as VMWare vSphere, OpenStack, or CloudStack.
Now we will discuss the features of Terraform.
Ansible is a software tool that provides simple but powerful automation for cross-platform computer support. It is primarily intended for IT professionals, who use it for application deployment, updates on workstations and servers, cloud provisioning, configuration management, intra-service orchestration, and nearly anything a systems administrator does on a weekly or daily basis. Ansible doesn't depend on agent software and has no additional security infrastructure, so it's easy to deploy.
Now we will discuss the features of Ansible.
We’ve seen how Terraform and Ansible are command-line-oriented tools that are complementary in capability rather than adversarial. Lifecycle management of infrastructure lends itself to a Terraform declarative approach, whereas the imperative approach of Ansible is better suited to configuration management because of its customizability. Neither tool is active; both are “run and done”. As such, they don’t address high scale or high availability requirements.
Cloudify occupies a different niche than these tools; much more focused on enterprise use cases that value high scale and high availability. Rather than a passive approach to state management which potentially requires scanning hundreds or thousands of nodes for health checks, Cloudify integrates with monitoring applications like Nagios and Prometheus to respond in a focused manner to provide real-time day 2 operations like healing and scaling.
It is essential to know which tool is used for which job among Terraform vs. Ansible. Terraform is mainly known for provisioning infrastructure across various clouds. It supports more than 200 providers and is a great tool to manage cloud services below the server. In comparison, Ansible is optimized to perform both provisioning and configuration management. Therefore, we can say that both Terraform and Ansible can work hand in hand as standalone tools or work together but always pick up the right tool as per the job requirement.