2026-02-02, 14:50–15:40, B.3.0.13
For years, I was asking myself the wrong question: "Terraform or Ansible?" As if infrastructure provisioning and configuration management were the same problem. Spoiler: they're not, and trying to make one tool do both jobs is why your infrastructure code is a mess. This talk is about the liberation of discovering that OpenTofu (the Terraform fork) excels at infrastructure provisioning while Ansible owns configuration management—and that they work beautifully together when you go with the flow and use each tool for exactly what it was designed for.
You'll learn:
- Why declarative infrastructure provisioning (OpenTofu) and imperative configuration (Ansible) solve fundamentally different problems
- How to generate dynamic Ansible inventories directly from OpenTofu state
- Practical patterns: OpenTofu provisions the servers, creates the inventory, then hands off to Ansible for the "Day 2" configuration
- When to stop: knowing which tool should own which resources (hint: if you're using Ansible's cloud modules, you're probably doing it wrong)
- Real examples from production: building cloud infrastructure with OpenTofu and configuring it with Ansible in a clean, maintainable pipeline
You'll leave with a clearer mental model of the provisioning/configuration boundary, working code examples, and the confidence to tell your team "we're using both, and here's why that's correct."
James Freeman is a published author and Senior Technical Account Manager at AWS, bringing over 25 years of technology expertise. With more than a decade of hands-on experience, James has tackled complex enterprise challenges in real-world production environments using Ansible, often introducing this powerful automation tool to CTOs and organizations for the first time. As the author of five authoritative books on Ansible, James is a recognized thought leader in IT automation. His expertise extends to facilitating tailored Ansible workshops and training sessions, and he is a sought-after speaker, having presented at international conferences and community meetups. James's passion for empowering others through automation continues to inspire engineers and businesses to unlock new possibilities in IT.