Understanding the role of Ansible and Terraform in cloud infrastructure management illuminates their distinct approaches. Terraform excels in providing clear, predictable provisioning with its declarative syntax and state management, catering to lifecycle control of resources like Google Cloud Storage buckets. Ansible, with its imperative style, is adept at flexible, on-the-fly configurations, handling not only infrastructure but also software deployments. The choice between them hinges on project specifics, highlighting the need to suit tool to task for optimal infrastructure management.