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IMO, this is an area where I think Terraform + Ansible pairs so well together.

If there’s ever a gap in what Terraform offers you can pretty easily fill it with Ansible.

And this setup is also encouraged by HashiCorp (at least I saw a talk by them). Use ansible for your “smart” sequential executions and Terraform as a sane wrapper for state.

I’ve found running Terraform via Ansible to be a pretty good experience.

So the other way around. Do you employ a GitOps approach this way?

I find it hard to figure out how to use GitOps with Ansible? How do you make a PullRequest which indicates that something should get deleted? You still would have to keep around an ansible playbook for the stuff you want to delete.

I’ve seen (and fixed) so many ugly messes at this point made as a result of mixing and wrapping tools with different purposes together like Ansible + Terraform that it’s something I strongly discourage. I recommend to keep the boundaries and responsibilities of the tools clear. In this case, Terraform for the creation of resources and Ansible for the configuration of those resources. In my opinion, this gives as a result a much simpler and maintainable ecosystem in the long run.

Ansible is also amazing with Packer as the provisioner.

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