How does Terraform differ from Ansible?

Terraform and Ansible are tools for managing infrastructure, but they solve different tasks and operate differently.

• Terraform is a tool for declarative description and management of infrastructure as code (IaC). It allows creating, modifying, and deleting resources in clouds and other platforms, supports change planning (terraform plan), and ensures idempotency.

• Ansible is a tool for automating configuration, deploying applications, and managing systems. It uses YAML playbooks to describe the steps to be executed on servers.

In simpler terms, Terraform is often used for creating and modifying infrastructure (virtual machines, networks, databases), while Ansible is used for configuring existing servers and deploying software.

Example:

# Terraform example of creating a virtual machine
resource "aws_instance" "example" {
  ami           = "ami-123456"
  instance_type = "t2.micro"
}

# Ansible example of installing nginx
- hosts: webservers
  tasks:
    - name: Install nginx
      apt:
        name: nginx
        state: present