What is the difference between infrastructure configuration using Ansible and Terraform?

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

• Terraform is a tool for declarative description of infrastructure as code (IaC). It is designed for creating, modifying, and managing resources in clouds and other platforms. Terraform works with providers (AWS, Azure, GCP, etc.) and manages the lifecycle of resources, ensuring idempotency and rollback capabilities.

• Ansible is a tool for automating configuration and managing the state of existing servers and applications. It uses SSH to connect to hosts and performs tasks such as configuration, software installation, script execution, etc.

Key difference: Terraform is responsible for creating and modifying infrastructure (virtual machines, networks, databases), while Ansible handles configuration and software management on these machines.

Example: using Terraform, you create a virtual machine in the cloud, and with Ansible, you install a web server on it and configure it.