There was a time when every startup used it. Now I don't know any startup that is. I suppose it's possible that the big infra managers use it with their teams. -- I wouldn't know, but the necessity for Ansible by the bulk of developers has evaporated due to containerization.

Ansible + Terraform is basically the modern infra stack if you’re not on k8s.

Ansible is a powertool for implementing idempotent configuration management. That pattern / paradigm is here to stay.

I'd never call anything imperative (as opposed to declarative) a power-tool for implementing idempotent anything.

Amen. Useful tool _in which one might_ implement idempotent patterns, yeah.

It pretty much is declarative enough to count, if you describe your operations in enough detail and rely on modules where you can. Not many people bother to go 100%, but you can easily get to 99%.

Mail.ru and Yandex used it, i've seen people deploy their Kotlin web apps

plenty of startups still using it

basically if you don’t want to go kubernetes, you’re gonna use ansible