[bryogenic]

There are so many answers here that are incorrect about what ansible is/does. Thank you for providing one that is correct.

If I could add to your answer:

Not only is ansible declarative and idempotent but it also includes countless cloud provisioning modules to bring idempotency to cloud environments.

Terraform may be easier for basic provisioning of cloud resources but I always switch back to ansible cloud modules when I need to do anything complex. Ansible also has the added benefit of easily context switching over to configuring the compute resources after they have launched.