Trends come and go. I too use terraform now because that is what my customers use. Previously we have used Ansible for the same thing, in a largeish environmen

Trends come and go. I too use terraform now because that is what my customers use. Previously we have used Ansible for the same thing, in a largeish environment, in production. It had the obvious benefit of declarative and stateless. The other comments here seem to focus on how that works badly together with manual state changes made externally from the system. The answer is that it requires another way of working where the state is the git repo. The question is not what to do when someone spawns extra test nodes, but why they did not do it in a version controlled manner. Perhaps as a reaction to the discipline required, something about Kubernetes attracted a lot of people used to manipulating state by manual interaction. Every installation I have seen has a web interface in use, whereas not as many have in the Ansible world. I fully expect this pendulum to swing back and become more declarative and version controlled again.