So what are provisioning tools? Infrastructure as Code (IaC) offers developers and operations teams the facility to automate the processes to manage and provision the infrastructure required for their application’s technology stack. The configuration of the discrete hardware devices and operating systems that comprise the infrastructure can now be undertaken using code, replacing the traditional manual approach. This automation makes the Infrastructure provisioning process faster while reducing the probability of configuration errors, leading to cost and time savings.

Terraform and Ansible are both open-source software tools that support the development of Infrastructure as Code (IaC). This facilitates the management and provisioning of infrastructure with software-based configuration control for physical and virtual services. IaC enables infrastructure to be defined using software modules. This enhances maintainability, promotes reusability, and allows near pain-free scalability. Both software tools use a functional approach, using declarative configuration to state the infrastructure’s desired final state. The system then executes the actions required to achieve this desired state.