What are the key differences between Terraform and Ansible tools in infrastructure automation?

Terraform and Ansible are both tools for infrastructure automation, but with different approaches and goals:

• Terraform is a tool for declarative infrastructure management (Infrastructure as Code). It describes the desired state of infrastructure (virtual machines, networks, databases) and ensures its creation, modification, and deletion. Terraform works with cloud and service providers, managing resources at the infrastructure level.

• Ansible is a tool for configuration management and task automation. It is used to configure and manage existing servers and applications, install software, run scripts, etc. Ansible operates on a push model, using SSH to connect to hosts.

Key differences:

• Terraform manages infrastructure (creating/deleting resources), Ansible manages configuration and setup.
• Terraform is declarative, Ansible is mainly imperative (though it has declarative elements).
• Terraform stores the state of infrastructure, Ansible does not.

Example: with Terraform, you create a virtual machine in the cloud, and with Ansible, you install necessary software on it and configure services.