Hey William,

Hope the summer weather has been treating you well! So...to answer your questions:

1. I don't have enough experience in that area to make a recommendation. :(

2. My job does involve infrastructure. My current workplace uses Terraform. My personal preference is either Ansible or Pulumi. If you want a fully-declarative solution, use Ansible. I wrote a post recently about using Ansible to create resources in GCP (https://medium.com/dzerolabs/using-ansibles-gcp-library-to-provision-a-kubernetes-cluster-in-google-cloud-6fd1910f1700). If you'ure comfortable with state files and prefer a more software-focused approach over Terraform's HCL, use Pulumi (no post on that...yet).

My latest dabblings are in OpenStack. It's been a fun adventure so far. Hope to post about that soon! :D