Ansible VS terraform

Ansible is an open-source IT automation tool that simplifies application deployment, cloud provisioning, and configuration management across diverse environments. It uses a declarative language to describe the desired state of the system, and then takes the necessary actions to achieve that state. Ansible has become incredibly popular due to its simplicity, agentless architecture, and extensive community support. Document: ansible.com, ansible basics

Ansible v2.16

Ansible is a tool used to help manage software automation processes, configuration management across machines, deployment as well as remote execution of commands and scripts. In sports, Ansible operates as the coach of your team by providing strategies (playbooks), and actions, and ensuring the smooth execution of tasks across your infrastructure, just like a coach guides and directs players (Servers)during a game.

They support for-if from python, too: https://jinja.palletsprojects.com/en/3.1.x/templates/#loop-f... but I haven't tried the "recursive" keyword to know if ansible supports that. I say "ansible supports that" because they don't just drop jinja2 into ansible and call it a draw, they have a bunch of custom execution integrations: https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/v2.16.3/lib/ansible/...

To manage a VM, you can use something as simple as just manual actions over SSH, or can use tools like Ansible, Hashicorp's Packer and Terraform or other automations. For an app where there is minimal load and security/reliability concern, VMs are still a great option that provide a lot of value for the buck

In this article's context, it is simply a tool that provides a declarative way to automate your machine/OS to configure the development machine as you want (install package, modify the configuration, etc). Examples of these tools are Ansible, Puppet, etc.

Now we're getting more tangential, but for years, Ansible releases were named for Van Halen songs (see old Changelog here: https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/v1.8.4/CHANGELOG.md)

In the lab to follow, we'll quickly provision a 3-node kubeadm cluster (1 master, 2 workers) on the cloud provider of your choice using an automation stack comprised of OpenTofu and Ansible, then deploy Rook Ceph using the official Helm charts and confirm that we are now able to successfully create CSI volume snapshots from PVCs by reusing the MinIO example from our last article.

I am not only a big fan of hashicorp terraform. I'm also one of the early adopters of it. So this is my main go-to Infrastructure as a Code tool. However all the resources I use are supported by other IaaC solutions such as AWS CloudFormation and AWS CDK. You definitely got to use one to avoid loosing the track of resources you create.

State Encryption was one of those long requested features[0] (I had it on my ideas list for years[1]) that Hashicorp didn't have much incentive to build. I don't think it has to with distancing opentofu as such, but the opentofu team prioritizing the right things that customers actually need.

[0]: https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/issues/9556

[1]: https://github.com/captn3m0/ideas#-mars-terraform-remote-htt...

https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/issues/34402

I’m not a lawyer and have no idea who is right or wrong but I understand why Hashicorp is scrutinizing this.

Just to give an example of the power of Go for CLI builds, you may have already used or at least heard of Docker, Kubernetes, Prometheus, Terraform, but what do they all have in common? They all have a large part of their usability via CLI and are developed in Go 🐿.

Each app’s front end is built with Qwik and uses Tailwind for styling. The server-side is powered by Qwik City (Qwik’s official meta-framework) and runs on Node.js hosted on a shared Linode VPS. The apps also use PM2 for process management and Caddy as a reverse proxy and SSL provisioner. The data is stored in a PostgreSQL database that also runs on a shared Linode VPS. The apps interact with the database using Drizzle, an Object-Relational Mapper (ORM) for JavaScript. The entire infrastructure for both apps is managed with Terraform using the Terraform Linode provider, which was new to me, but made provisioning and destroying infrastructure really fast and easy (once I learned how it all worked).

For example, integrating Terraform for infrastructure as code (IaC) into the IDP can streamline updates and rollbacks.

In this project, you will understand and get hands on experience around the entire concept around CI/CD from applications perspective. To fully gain real expertise around this idea, it is best to see it in action across different programming languages and from the platform perspective too. From the application perspective, we will be focusing on PHP here; there are more projects ahead that are based on Java, Node.js, .Net and Python. By the time you start working on Terraform, Docker and Kubernetes projects, you will get to see the platform perspective of CI/CD in action.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is an important part of any true hosting operation in the public cloud. Each of these platforms has their own IaC solution, e.g. AWS CloudFormation. But they also support popular open-source IaC tools like Pulumi or Terraform. A category of tools that also needs to be discussed is API gateways and other app-specific load balancers. There are applications for internal consumption, which can be called microservices if you have a lot of them. And often microservices use advanced networking options such as a service mesh instead of just the native private network offered by a VPC.