Combining Ansible with Terraform for a full deployment solution

One of the best things about automation tools is that they can often be combined to offer a shared benefit. Ansible is one of my favorite tools: you can automate the installation of packages, the creation of users, the copying of files, or most other tasks you can think of. If you are able to perform a task on the command line, chances are Ansible can automate it. Terraform, as you just saw, is really good at creating new infrastructure and automating the initial setup of servers, as well as networks and settings for AWS and other platforms. If we combine the two, it gets even better.

I find the duo of Terraform and Ansible to be a great fit. Combining these two solutions works well in my experience; we can use Terraform to create our initial server and infrastructure builds, and then use Ansible to automate future enhancements. But it’s actually even better than that; we can configure Terraform to actually...