Ansible and Terraform are popular automation platforms that are used to manage and deploy infrastructure. Ansible automates the configuration, and management of IT infrastructure and applications. Terraform, focuses on provisioning infrastructure and provides powerful automation capabilities across multiple cloud providers and on-premises environments. Both automation platforms, and complementary customised Python scripts are currently used at a bank located in Basel. The documentation's objective is to determine whether both platforms are required for the banks' automation strategy.

The process of the practical project starts with identifying the client’s specific environment and a market-research on the tools which are most popular on the market. Some of the popular tools and their capabilities are laid out in a separate chapter, to provide an overview how these platforms are useful. The project team concludes interviews with the affected teams and extracts how both automation platforms are used at the bank. With all the new acquired information, it is possible to come up with a criteria schema for possible use cases to automate.

As the market is growing with Infrastructure-as-code tools, it is beneficial for companies to compare the different available tools with the tools already in use. The interview results show that the teams at the bank mostly use Ansible and only the cloud team relies on Terraform. Looking at the automation aspects some teams already automate many use cases, while other teams prefer Python scripts and manual tasks. Regarding Ansible and Terraform, both tools are capable for similar automation processes but each with its own strength, therefore a combination of both, Ansible and Terraform is recommended for the use cases at the bank in Basel. To ensure the quality of the automation process, it is recommended that the teams define principles which tasks they want to automate. The principles together with the criteria schema in the documentation help the team to develop their further automation strategy.