Question

Is terraform alternative to configuration management tools like ansible or puppet?? Can somebody please clarify?

Answer 1

Ansible/Puppet/Chef is primarily a configuration management tool, commonly abbreviated as “CM”, and Terraform is an orchestration tool.

Terraform manages low-level components such as compute instances, containerization, storage, and networking, as well as high-level components such as DNS entries, SaaS features, etc.

Ansible and Salt-Stack are a competitor for Chef and Puppet with different mechanisms.  Ansible and salt use push while chef and puppet use pull. All 4 of these are deployment management such as OS release, software version, etc