This is awesome. Thank you for making this, I will be buying a hard copy. I have recently had to learn DevOps due to being on a project setting up infrastructure, and have now been exposed to Ansible and Terraform. These are extremely powerful tools. Do you use Terraform at all, or do you do your provisioning with Ansible? Is Ansible able to do the things that Terraform would be used for? Just curious for your thoughts. Thanks!
Terraform excels at provisioning resources, and Ansible excels at configuring resources, but can also provision most things as-needed.
For simpler things (eg small infra where I might need to configure a route 53 domain, a few EC2 instances, and something in RDS), I would stick with Ansible since I can do everything from AMI build to provision to reconfigure/deploy with it.
But for a lot of more complicated things, I do use Terraform. I'm working on a good example of using Terraform with GCP for Kubernetes in my next book, and will likely also show how I still tie things together with Ansible.
For provisioning, Packer + Ansible seems like a great combination.
I used both recently to setup a Discourse site and associated Postfix mail server. Packer spins up the machines and then calls Ansible to handle the actual provisioning. Once that’s done, Packer takes a snapshot of each machine, so you end up with images that are ready for deployment with, e.g., Terraform.
Granted, this was just a toy project for me to try these tools out, so any advice would be appreciated!
