A comparison between Terraform and Ansible on their impact upon the lifecycle and security management for modifiable cloud infrastructures in OpenStack.

Abstract: Automating the deployment, security risk minimization, scaling, maintenance and development processes is highly critical, as it enables unleashing the potential of cloud computing. The flexibility and reliability advantages of cloud computing are not fully disclosed without automation of lifecycle processes. The flexibility of the automation solution is directly proportional to the quality of performed lifecycle processes for the entire infrastructure. Nowadays, a lot of companies are in constant search forflexible decisions for their infrastructure for further growth and decrease the usage exploitation of resources when they have a non-use state to avoid additional financial costs. Orchestrator techniques to automate configuration, coordination, and management of computer systems and software are used to meet such infrastructure's demand. Infrastructure as a Code took a large part in automation processes from the beginning of the growing demand for Cloud Computing, but now the new era of orchestration and demand on flexibility capabilities has come, which IaC has to cover. Last decade, multiple IaC solutions appeared. Each of them has a different performance as orchestrators. Flexibility of the orchestrator is measured by configuration capabilities and workflow control of operations via internal features. Nevertheless, time and required computational resources are an important part of orchestrator performance as well. Protracted delays between lifecycle processes and extra-high computational resource demand lead to high financial costs and high service downtime. Computational resource consumption and time metrics, configuration capabilities are the core of orchestrator performance