"best suited" is the question. How do you measure this? what are the metrics and why do you choose them? I think you are looking for some kind of "tools combination", earlier tested on production by someone else's if preferred. What you want to do is try some opensource/free private cloud on-premises and run IaC on this private environment. You can test tools forever. How do you compare those tools? I believe all of them works fine as long as there is not any inconsistency problem. I think there is a missing/main part in your search when it comes to IaC. Because of few options for that missing angle as well. I think it is better to create a chart for all of us as you are going this process in order to benefit people here. Do you have a working environment? If so could you please detail all the tools you used to create this environment?
Some vendors run open source projects. How about them?
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation seeks to drive adoption of this paradigm by fostering and sustaining an ecosystem of open source, vendor-neutral projects.CNCF Cloud Native Definition v1.0
I started to wonder if this is cloud-native then what is it that is not cloud-native?
I think this is what you are looking for. The distinction between provider and provisioner is blurred. A workflow automation tool should be doing what cloud orchestrator with GUI does. Terraform makes a distinction between provider and provisioner but Cloudify removes them as I see it. For an architect designing the whole workflow with GUI might be useful to reach the desired state. Writing desired state for which you do DRY tests already beforehand or showing with graphs. There is something you know already where it goes since you already tested, seeing it flowing in graphics workflow makes sense? Then go for it. To me it is painting the history I do not see the benefit.
There are many ways to break down the types of automation, whether it’s imperative versus declarative, or orchestration versus desired configuration state.
Most orchestrators are fully CLI based, or offer very limited GUI operations. A distinct advantage here is that Cloudify enables you to one-click your way through architectural relationship diagrams. See: Terraform vs. Cloudify.
Providers
A provider is responsible for understanding API interactions and exposing resources. Providers generally are an IaaS (e.g. AWS, GCP, Microsoft Azure, OpenStack), PaaS (e.g. Heroku), or SaaS services (e.g. Terraform Enterprise, DNSimple, CloudFlare). See: Providers.
Provisioners
Provisioners are used to execute scripts on a local or remote machine as part of resource creation or destruction. Provisioners can be used to bootstrap a resource, cleanup before destroy, run configuration management, etc. See: Provisioners.
