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I can't say I liked one of his proposed alternatives: Terraform I tried it and found the experience to be far inferior to Ansible, especially if you provision

I can't say I liked one of his proposed alternatives: Terraform I tried it and found the experience to be far inferior to Ansible, especially if you provision actual Linux instances with it. Terraform was always getting stuck in an inconsistent state, and trying to roll back, which doesn't work well for any type of stateful resource. I guess Terraform may be ok for provisioning resources which are stateless and interchangeable, say security groups and other simple services. I can't say I enjoyed using it much, though the rest of Hashicorp's offerings, Nomad, Consul etc are really great.

allanmacgregor 6y ago
Well now you are comparing apples to oranges, terraform main focus is managing and provisioning infrastructure while ansible is more commonly used to do the actual instance provisioning and configuration. In fact, Terraform + Ansible is a fairly common and powerful stack.
HatchedLake721 6y ago
Ansible and Terraform is like Apples and Oranges. They’re completely different tools completing each other.
mvanbaak 6y ago
While it's possible to provision actual instances with terraform, it's not what you should be doing. Let terraform handle the infrastructure, and have ansible or puppet or saltstack or cfengine or whatever provisioning tool to do the instance setup. It's all about the right tool for the job, and managing your linux install with terraform is not that.
diroussel 6y ago
Yes terraform and ansible have different sweet spots. Terraform is best when managing stateless resources. It can handle stateful resources, but as always managing state gets tricky fast. If what you are CRUD-ing doesn't map well to the terraform concept of a resource, then don't use it. SO i don't like to use to create anaything inside a VM. Using terraform to create an auto-scaling group is good, though, as it can be represented as a stateless resouce. Or rather any state in it is transient.

allanmacgregor 6y ago

Well now you are comparing apples to oranges, terraform main focus is managing and provisioning infrastructure while ansible is more commonly used to do the actual instance provisioning and configuration. In fact, Terraform + Ansible is a fairly common and powerful stack.

HatchedLake721 6y ago

Ansible and Terraform is like Apples and Oranges. They’re completely different tools completing each other.

mvanbaak 6y ago

While it's possible to provision actual instances with terraform, it's not what you should be doing. Let terraform handle the infrastructure, and have ansible or puppet or saltstack or cfengine or whatever provisioning tool to do the instance setup. It's all about the right tool for the job, and managing your linux install with terraform is not that.

diroussel 6y ago

Yes terraform and ansible have different sweet spots. Terraform is best when managing stateless resources. It can handle stateful resources, but as always managing state gets tricky fast. If what you are CRUD-ing doesn't map well to the terraform concept of a resource, then don't use it. SO i don't like to use to create anaything inside a VM. Using terraform to create an auto-scaling group is good, though, as it can be represented as a stateless resouce. Or rather any state in it is transient.