[geerlingguy]

The best thing about this is even though Ansible and Terraform seem to do some similar things (Ansible, of course, has a few other tricks up its sleeve, but just comparing the tools in terms of infrastructure orchestration...), there's plenty of room in this space for multiple solutions.

Just like Chef and Puppet seem to have leapt off from a solid platform started by cfengine et all, and made 'configuration as code' a thing, Ansible, Salt cloud, and Terraform seem to be kicking off the 'infrastructure as code' movement (and are adapting to many different workflows—Docker, Chef, Puppet, etc. play nicely in this sandbox).

Too many places rely on band-aids, shell scripts, and manual process for infrastructure, mostly because tools like Ansible and Terraform haven't existed until recently (or today, in Terraform's case).

[CraigJPerry]

+1 for too many places rely on band aids. The frustrating thing is that there's no need now. These tools are adoptable by almost anyone and if you use them you shine a giant spotlight into the previously dimly lit area of your system configurations. You get documentation, testability and version control of your infra. It's extremely liberating.

One of the most valuable things has turned out to be the ability to refactor infra as a project evolves. Some task that would have required a few hands and a project manager now becomes a few edits.

I lead a CFEngine team and It never fails to amaze people when I demo end to end life cycle management "that used to take 3 guys 2 days" etc.

P.s. I use ansible at home though: https://github.com/CraigJPerry/home-network