I'm using both Terraform Cloud and on-prem dev infrastructure. Is it worth managing my on-prem in Terraform?

Most of my infrastructure is on AWS, and is managed by Terraform Cloud.

However, I also have some old computers set up in my bedroom for use as development servers (e.g. for build pipelines). Is it worth representing these bedroom servers as Terraform resources, and if so how would I do it?

Terraform is mainly for infastructure provisioning, but it can also do some configuration management for existing bare metal. This works best if you use a resource scheduler like Apache Mesos, Kubernetes or Docker. If you don’t use resource schedulers, other tools might be better suited for the job.

Quote from the docs:

Configuration management tools install and manage software on a machine that already exists. Terraform is not a configuration management tool, and it allows existing tooling to focus on their strengths: bootstrapping and initializing resources.

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I might use Docker occasionally, but that’s it. Okay, I’ll leave my home servers alone and just configure them separately. Maybe I’ll finally learn how to use Ansible or something. Thank you.

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