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Re:Ask HN: Ansible vs. Terraform by bproven on Tuesday March 13, 2018 @11:34AM (#16576957)
A good strategy is to use both (these are complementary tools) - one is stronger for config management (Ansible), the other for provisioning infrastructure (TF). Build and manage the infra itself (instances, security groups, VPCs etc) with TF and use Ansible to configure (e.g. install, maintain nginx on the instance). They work well together since there is a provisioner for Ansible in TF.

Optionally if you go the totally immutable route you may only need TF (plus somethig like packer) and not Ansible.

I have not had to migrate from on to the other, so unfortunately I can't be much help here. Maybe someone else can share their insights on that (including benefits/drawbacks).

Re:Ask HN: Ansible vs. Terraform by albertlie on Wednesday March 14, 2018 @06:41AM (#16583702)
Hi Bproven,

Thanks for the answer! Did you use terraform or ansible fully then in your current work? Any challenges you can share when dealing with terraform or is there any reason you fully use Terraform?

Re:Ask HN: Ansible vs. Terraform by bproven on Thursday March 15, 2018 @07:24PM (#16597371)
For TF, I found it easy to work with and also cloud agnostic (nice bonus). So you only have to learn one tool instead of one for each cloud provider (Azure's Resource templates , AWS's CloudFormation, etc).

Also it seems to have great traction in the industry and is a very active project so I don't see it going anywhere soon...

Re:Ask HN: Ansible vs. Terraform by albertlie on Friday March 16, 2018 @01:44AM (#16598884)
Got it. Thanks!