Ansible vs Terraform: Best DevOps tool?

Originally posted on https://www.virtualizationhowto.com by Brandon Lee on August 10, 2023

Ansible and Terraform are excellent DevOps tools that can provide many automation benefits in enterprise and cloud environments. Both of them have capabilities that can overlap with each other. However, I would say that each has its strengths in configuring and provisioning infrastructure. Look at Ansible vs Terraform and see which automation tool is best for which task.

At a high-level

Ansible and Terraform are two of my favorite DevOps tools as they provide quick time to value, and you can start accomplishing a lot by using them. I started first with Ansible as for me I was looking more for a configuration management tool at the time.

When I started looking to provision infrastructure, Terraform was the name that kept coming up. And it is great at provisioning infrastructure. The short answer, in my opinion, to Ansible vs Terraform is this:

• Ansible for configuration management
• Terraform for infrastructure provisioning

I think these are the strength of these two DevOps tools. However, can they both do some configuration management and deploy infrastructure? Yes, they can. I think Ansible is probably better at playing both sides than Terraform. However, Terraform has provisioners that can be used for some configuration management, but this is not its strong suit, and the provisioned actions…