alt Hacker NewsI never understood this. Why not use Ansible instead, especially if you already use it? Doubly so when you have Cisco config to manage. The experience is generally so much better it's not comparable, and it is much easier to infer running state.
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It's not the same purpose. Ansible is useful to configure your IAC, terraform to deploy and handle the state, which is very useful when you have multiple teams working on the same infrastructure.
What you can do if you _really_ like ansible is to use it to generate the terraform files (typically from Jinja2 template). In practice, i think Terragrunt is easier to use if you already have terraform modules. But if i was back at my first "real" job, where we had between 50 and 80 ansible modules (very short ones, it was really good, i've never saw an infrastructure that complex handled that concisely and easily), and if we had to use terraform, i would use ansible to generate terraform files 100%.
Because one's a language & tool for infrastructure as code, and the other's essentially a low-code ops scripting framework?
Ansible and terraform have some overlap, but they do tend to serve different purposes. The consequences of terraform having a state file should steer your decision.
However, I often find ansible modules to be confusing to use. Maybe with LLMs it's now easier to draft ansible roles and maintain them, but I always had agro whenever I needed to go to the docs for something I've done many times just because the modules are that much inconsistent.