What are the key differences between Terraform and Ansible for infrastructure automation?
The question is about Terraform
The critical difference between Terraform and Ansible is the approach and focus. Terraform is an IaC tool applied mainly for infrastructure provision and management. Terraform regulates the desired state across cloud and on-premises environments through a declarative language known as HCL. It efficiently manages the state, therefore making setups repeatable and idempotent. Ansible, on the other hand, is a configuration management tool. It uses an imperative, YAML-based approach to automation for software installation and configuration on already existing servers. Where Terraform is particularly adept at creating and maintaining infrastructure, Ansible shines when it comes to managing and configuring software within that infrastructure, making it complementary to DevOps workflows.
