Ansible vs Terraform battle continues to escalate as the DevOps environment focuses more on automation and orchestration. These two tools help in automating configurations and deploying infrastructure. Terraform offers to deploy Infrastructure as a Code, helps in readability and lift and shift deployments. Ansible is a configuration management tool for automating system configuration and management. By Sandeep Kumar.
The article then deals with:
- What is Terraform?
- What is Ansible?
- Similarities between Terraform and Ansible
- Difference between Terraform and Ansible provisioning (Terraform vs. Ansible)
- Orchestration vs. configuration management
- Declarative vs. procedural
- Mutable vs. immutable
- State management
… and more. Terraform comes with good scheduling capabilities and is very user-friendly. It integrates with docker well, as docker handles the configuration management slightly better than Terraform. But there is no clear evidence of how the target devices are brought to their final state, and sometimes, the final configuration is unnecessary. Ansible comes with better security and ACL functionality. It is considered a mature tool because it adjusts comfortably with traditional automation frameworks. It offers simple operations and helps to code quickly. But, on the other hand, it is not good at services like logical dependencies, orchestration services, and interconnected applications. Good read!
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