What is the difference between Terraform and Ansible?
Answer
Terraform and Ansible serve complementary but different purposes. Terraform: declarative, infrastructure provisioning tool. Best for creating and managing cloud resources (VMs, networks, databases, Kubernetes clusters). Manages state and detects drift. Stateful — knows what it has created. Ansible: procedural, configuration management and application deployment tool. Best for installing software on existing servers, configuring OS settings, deploying applications. Stateless — does not track what it has changed. Uses SSH/WinRM to connect to targets. Common pattern: use Terraform to provision the infrastructure (create EC2 instances, VPC, RDS), then use Ansible to configure the servers (install Nginx, deploy application code, set up monitoring). They are complementary tools — Terraform handles infrastructure provisioning, Ansible handles what runs on that infrastructure.