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Comment by Jasp3r | Hacker News Reader

Ansible and Puppet are for infrastructure automation across multiple VMs. Terraform is a way to declare cloud (native) infrastructure as code.

Ansible and Puppet are not used anymore because of the shift to cloud native, not because they are stateless.

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I wasn't suggesting that CMS fell from grace because they were being stateless. I was saying that when TF just started, these tools were in the right position to take lead over the IaaC space and didn't because the stateless model didn't fit. Take a look at Ansible's cloud modules, they tried.

TF's success, in my opinion, can be boiled down to:

a) Having a state - allowed them to provide declarative config with plan functionality

b) Choosing Go - removed the burden of installing or having to invest in self contained setup like they did with Vagrant & ruby.

I'm not a TF zealot. I hate my life every time I need to use it. And yet I know that there are no better alternatives out there. I'm sure there are some nice things in Pulumi or cdk-tf but I doubt switching to any worth the investment with existing TF project.

I would be glad to try and play with a tf-like project that works without state - "talk is cheap, show me the code".

Off topic, but, cdk-tf is useless because it doesn't have a data layer. It gives you the power to write real code, but with no vars to utilize. It's rubbish.

We adopted Ansible two years ago. Still using it. So clearly there are some users.

You can manage cloud resources using puppet and Ansible...

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