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Comment by techntoke | Hacker News Reader

I moved away from Terraform a long time ago. Ansible was way more powerful, handled errors and issues with state changes. Terraform was super picky about how you had to operate, slow and HCL was a terrible markup language. I wasn't really a huge fan of Ansible either though and more recently have been doing things in regular shell/Bash scripts. Now with Kubernetes and service brokers, there is no need for Terraform.

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Ansible can very easily, and often does, end up in situations where two runs of the same playbook both have drastically different results. roles/playbooks slowly become Bash scripts written in a YAML layer parsed as a Jinja2 template.. and the project turns into a mess of many layers of indirection.

it attempts to and encourages declarative configuration, but is very hard to keep that way. it is difficult and requires determination to make Terraform do something in a non-declarative fashion.

the end result is that when I look at a Terraform configuration I can very easily tell what is going on, because the end result is exactly what I read. where with Ansible, it very much depends on understanding the current state of the server you are about to run this playbook on, and you just have to cross your fingers and hope for the best.

I have many Ansible roles that I trust to do the right thing over and over again. Though, I never use bash for scripting, and when I do shell out in Ansible I keep it extremely simple and always use a `when` or `creates` condition to keep it idempotent.

Maybe you never worked in a company with good ansible practices.

following best practices with C will get you code without memory leaks or overflow errors, yet here we are in 2019 still routinely dealing with those in mission critical software written by people who understand what they are doing.

Terraform is a tool designed to overcome the problems that "best practices" will supposedly prevent you from introducing in your Ansible playbook.

don't get me wrong. Ansible is a wonderful tool for certain applications (configuration management). I would just never use it to spin up infrastructure again.

While there is certainly overlap, these products are trying to solve different problems.

Ansible seems to focus on managing infrastructure, Terraform shines when creating infrastructure.

What about setting up and tearing down EKS clusters? I haven't used terraform but I learned about it through looking at this:

https://learn.hashicorp.com/terraform/aws/eks-intro

So, I'd say Kubernetes itself does more heavy lifting but not all of it?

I use Terraform to create EKS, works pretty well. I have it setup to use Spot instances with a standard compute node as well as GPU nodes when needed.

https://github.com/JasonCarter80/contoso_aws_k8s/tree/master...

Spinning up an EKS cluster is something you usually do once, and if you need multiple EKS clusters then you can bootstrap others from an initial cluster that you deploy with eksctl or AWS CLI.

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