I know Ansible has a huge number of fans but I am genuinely curious about the future. That is, I've been trying to figure out where ansible fits in the bigger picture of the modern trend towards IaC. Is it in conflict with that because of its semi-imperative nature? Or is what it does an essential piece of how IaC needs to work to do declarative infrastructure management? I see that for example you can use ansible within terraform. Do people really do that and is it useful? Or is it something you would only do if you have a lot of legacy infrastructure already configured via Ansible.
Curious on the general take here.