5 ms·

I haven't used Ansible so maybe I'm incorrect here but aren't tf and Ansible solving slightly different problems? Terraform feels like infrastructure managemen

I haven't used Ansible so maybe I'm incorrect here but aren't tf and Ansible solving slightly different problems? Terraform feels like infrastructure management to me. We use it to provision underlying resources: Networking, Clusters, Nodes, Alerts, etc. All of the actual code deployments are entirely separate. Ansible is more of a configuration management right?

ggregoire 6y ago
I've never used them but there are modules to provision stuff on AWS: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/scenario_guides/guide_aws.html https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/scenario_guides/guid... Edit: seems limited to ec2 and s3: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/amazon/aws/index.html#plugins-in-amazon-aws https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/amazon/a... Although you could provision other services with some custom modules using the aws-cli.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
timdev2 6y ago
Right. And you can use something like terraform-inventory[0] as a dynamic inventory source in Ansible. So TF manages all the bits and bobs floating around in AWS, and then ansible takes over to manage configuration on whatever EC2 instances are involved. [0]: https://github.com/adammck/terraform-inventory https://github.com/adammck/terraform-inventory
throwdbaaway 6y ago
Not really. In terms of functionalities, I consider ansible as a superset of terraform, without all the state management stuffs. Distributed systems are hard, and I will just let my cloud providers to be the single source of truth of all the states. Here's a comment from the author of ansible when terraform was first released: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8100036 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8100036 > One of the things shown in the Ansible examples are how to do a cloud deploy in one hop, i.e. request resources and also configure the stack all the way to the end, from one button press, and can also be used to orchestrate the rolling updates of those machines, working with the cloud load balancers and so on, throughout their entire life cycle -- all using just the one tool.
matwood 6y ago
Yeah. I use packer and ansible to build/configure AMIs. Terraform manages the configuration that launches said AMIs (through things like autoscaling, etc...).

ggregoire 6y ago

I've never used them but there are modules to provision stuff on AWS: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/scenario_guides/guide_aws.html https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/scenario_guides/guid... Edit: seems limited to ec2 and s3: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/amazon/aws/index.html#plugins-in-amazon-aws https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/amazon/a... Although you could provision other services with some custom modules using the aws-cli.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

timdev2 6y ago

Right. And you can use something like terraform-inventory[0] as a dynamic inventory source in Ansible. So TF manages all the bits and bobs floating around in AWS, and then ansible takes over to manage configuration on whatever EC2 instances are involved. [0]: https://github.com/adammck/terraform-inventory https://github.com/adammck/terraform-inventory

throwdbaaway 6y ago

Not really. In terms of functionalities, I consider ansible as a superset of terraform, without all the state management stuffs. Distributed systems are hard, and I will just let my cloud providers to be the single source of truth of all the states. Here's a comment from the author of ansible when terraform was first released: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8100036 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8100036 > One of the things shown in the Ansible examples are how to do a cloud deploy in one hop, i.e. request resources and also configure the stack all the way to the end, from one button press, and can also be used to orchestrate the rolling updates of those machines, working with the cloud load balancers and so on, throughout their entire life cycle -- all using just the one tool.

matwood 6y ago

Yeah. I use packer and ansible to build/configure AMIs. Terraform manages the configuration that launches said AMIs (through things like autoscaling, etc...).