Yes!
TerraForm has been huge for us. Packer has been great. We plan on rolling out Vault fully and consul to our entire infrastructure.
The tools I listed above are essential along with Chef, ansible, and git are essential for our tools stack.
TerraForm has been huge for us. Packer has been great. We plan on rolling out Vault fully and consul to our entire infrastructure.
The tools I listed above are essential along with Chef, ansible, and git are essential for our tools stack.
Your assessment is roughly correct, Ansible is definitely easier to get started with, and if you just want to manage a small number of nodes that you have SSH access to, it's a good choice. Chef has a larger ecosystem, and a different communication model (VMs under management communicate out to a Chef server over HTTPS, no need for inbound ports to be opened). The tradeoff is a slightly longer learning cycle. I'm biased towards Chef because it's what I know, but having spent some time with Ansible it's a good choice for some use cases.