> It's the same as using Puppet or Ansible to modify a running VM, to "fix" the VM in place. This is a laborious and error-prone process which requires a great

> It's the same as using Puppet or Ansible to modify a running VM, to "fix" the VM in place. This is a laborious and error-prone process which requires a great deal of investment in the Configuration Management - essentially writing programs just to tell the system where each file should be. This doesn't track with my experience. Tools like terraform can be used in such a way that, instead of running an apply to update a resource in place, a change to the machine configuration would result in a deletion/new instance being spun up. Some operations are mutations, like updating the name of a security group for instance. But updating a host's configuration should be done by updating user data and creating a new instance, though it's true terraform offers the ability to perform the update either way.