Red Hat Ansible and HashiCorp Terraform Will Be Coming Together
BOSTON — If you were expecting Red Hat and HashiCorp to make a news announcement at Red Hat Summit about how they’d integrate the champion DevOps program Ansible with Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Terraform and secret manager Vault, you were in for a disappointment. But if you listened closely, you’d hear that plans are afoot to make it easier for the three programs to work in concert with each other.
After all, it only makes sense. After IBM’s acquisition of HashiCorp was completed in February 2025, IBM was poised to deliver a tightly integrated, end-to-end automation setup for enterprises navigating increasingly complex cloud environments. It was always the plan, IBM CFO James Kavanaugh told us in IBM’s April 2024 earnings call, that “The powerful combination of Red Hat’s Ansible Automation Platform’s (AAP) configuration management and Terraform’s automation will simplify provisioning and configuration of applications across hybrid cloud environments.”
It’s not just the technologies that play well together; their business cases also sync up nicely. According to the business-to-business market analysis company 6Sense, Terraform has a 33.48% market share of the configuration management market. Right behind it, in the number two spot, is Ansible, with 31.66%.
Historically, organizations have paired Terraform and Ansible to automate infrastructure and application deployment: Terraform provisions and manages IaC deployments, while Ansible handles configuration management and application deployment. However, these integrations have often required manual steps, custom scripts or “glue code” to keep workflows synchronized.
Messy
In a word, this is “messy.” So it’s reasonable, as Armon Dadgar, a HashiCorp co-founder and CTO, explained in a blog post not long after the acquisition was complete, that “One of the opportunities we have heard great enthusiasm for — and is actively part of customer solutions today — is HashiCorp Terraform with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and HashiCorp Vault with Red Hat OpenShift.“
Dadgar then outlined several concrete plans and ongoing projects to deepen the synergy between Terraform and Ansible. First, you’ll be able to use Terraform to generate Ansible inventories dynamically as it provisions infrastructure, ensuring Ansible always has an up-to-date view of managed resources without manual intervention. Both companies are also working on officially supported Terraform modules for Ansible and vice versa. This will enable you to trigger Ansible playbooks from Terraform and invoke Terraform actions from Ansible workflows.
This week, at the Red Hat Summit co-located AnsibleFest, Dadgar added, “Terraform Enterprise will add a post-provisioning hook to invoke AAP configuration workflows after resources are created using IaC.” Conversely, Ansible will link workflow job templates to Terraform Enterprise and provide AAP Configuration as Code (CaC) support for Terraform and Vault infrastructure. Thus, Ansible will be able to use Vault credentials. This will streamline the transition from infrastructure provisioning to configuration management.
In addition, by leveraging Terraform’s state management as a source of truth, Ansible can ensure configuration consistency and support advanced Day 2 operations such as drift detection and remediation.
Dadgar added that Terraform Enterprise and Event-Driven Ansible will be “going one level deeper” to tighten integrations beyond provisioning. Eventually, Ansible users will be able to share officially supported Terraform providers and modules.
You Can’t Get From Here to There
In a Summit fireside chat today between Dadgar and Red Hat CTO Chris Wright, Dadgar summed it up: “There’s no mechanism for Terraform doing Ansible.” For example, “you get to day n and you say, ‘Well, before I clean up the VM off Ansible to deregister it from ServiceNow, or pull all the certificates out, or delete my EDR software.’ There’s no way to do that today. So there’s a bunch of these hook points in the life cycle where we identified and said, ‘How do we so we can tightly integrate Terraform and Ansible’ … At day’s end, it’s really about telling a customer that Terraform and Ansible are so tightly integrated that they feel like a single platform, rather than tools you have to duct tape together.”
It’s not just these two top programs being brought together. In an interview, Wright told me, “HashiCorp is interested in learning what we’ve done with Ansible Lightspeed,” so perhaps we can look forward to a Terraform Lightspeed to bring AI tech support to Terraform users. Since the Lightspeed platform, which has already been ported to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 10 and OpenShift, this move should be relatively easy to do and would certainly find enthusiastic users. Still, Wright told me it’s not on the roadmap yet, but perhaps Dadgar will be announcing it later this year. Stay tuned.
What all this means in the long run, from where I sit, is that IBM’s integration of Red Hat Ansible and HashiCorp Terraform is more than a technical enhancement — it’s a strategic move to solidify IBM’s leadership in hybrid cloud automation. Together, Ansible, Terraform and Vault may soon offer customers an all-in-one platform for infrastructure provisioning, configuration, security, and cost management.
