What is Ansible ?
Ansible is a software tool that provides simple but powerful automation for cross-platform computer support.
It is primarily intended for IT professionals, who use it for application deployment, updates on workstations and servers, cloud provisioning, configuration management, intra-service orchestration, and nearly anything a systems administrator does on a weekly or daily basis. Ansible doesn’t depend on agent software and has no additional security infrastructure, so it’s easy to deploy.
What is Terraform ?
HashiCorp Terraform is an infrastructure as code tool that lets you define both cloud and on-prem resources in human-readable configuration files that you can version, reuse, and share. You can then use a consistent workflow to provision and manage all of your infrastructure throughout its lifecycle. Terraform can manage low-level components like compute, storage, and networking resources, as well as high-level components like DNS entries and SaaS features.
What is the difference between Terraform and Ansible ?
- Terraform is provisioning tool but Ansible is a configuration management tool.
- Terraform follows a declarative infrastructure as a code approach but Ansible follows a procedural approach.
- Terraform doesn’t support bare metal provisioning by default but Ansible supports the provisioning pf bare metal servers.
- Terraform doesn’t provde better support in terms of packaging and templating but Ansible provde full support for packaging and templating.
- Terraform highly depends on lifecycle or state management but Ansible does not have lifecycle management at all.