Platform engineering is the discipline of designing and building toolchains and workflows that enable self-service capabilities for software engineering organizations in the cloud-native era.

Platform Engineering

I would use the terraform_data resource to kick the script off <https://medium.com/@thiagoalves/a-reason-to-stop-using-the-terraform-null-resource-51180b2339>

I have used the null resource before to kick off ansible playbooks just to keep everything managed in TF

IMO, I think using Ansible is great... but it's often overkill. A lot of times for provisioning I can get away with using cloud init files like this
<https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform/tutorials/provision/cloud-init>

ooh thats even better, i keep forgetting cloud init exists :joy:

Yeah, it's stupid handy if you only need to setup provisioning once... if you want to keep everything in compliance or roll updates, Ansible is definitely the way to go.

However, most of the time when I want to roll an update, I just create a new VM and terminate the old one. :man-shrugging: