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Explain Terraform vs. Other Software

Terraform provides a flexible way to define and manage infrastructure resources across multiple cloud providers and services. It focuses on a higher level of abstraction than configuration tools or low-level APIs, and aims to provide a unified syntax for describing all infrastructure resources. Unlike custom solutions, Terraform is designed to scale with infrastructure complexity and take the burden of tool development off operators.

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79 views5 pages

Explain Terraform vs. Other Software

Terraform provides a flexible way to define and manage infrastructure resources across multiple cloud providers and services. It focuses on a higher level of abstraction than configuration tools or low-level APIs, and aims to provide a unified syntax for describing all infrastructure resources. Unlike custom solutions, Terraform is designed to scale with infrastructure complexity and take the burden of tool development off operators.

Uploaded by

ashoo
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Explain Terraform vs.

Other Software
Terraform provides a flexible abstraction of resources and providers.
This model allows for representing everything from physical hardware, virtual
machines, and containers, to email and DNS providers.
Because of this flexibility, Terraform can be used to solve many different problems.
This means there are a number of existing tools that overlap with the capabilities of
Terraform.
We compare Terraform to a number of these tools, but it should be noted that
Terraform is not mutually exclusive with other systems.
It can be used to manage a single application, or the entire datacenter.

Terraform vs. Chef, Puppet, etc.


Configuration management tools install and manage software on a machine that
already exists.
Terraform is not a configuration management tool, and it allows existing tooling to
focus on their strengths: bootstrapping and initializing resources.
Using provisioners, Terraform enables any configuration management tool to be used
to setup a resource once it has been created.
Terraform focuses on the higher-level abstraction of the datacenter and associated
services, without sacrificing the ability to use configuration management tools to do
what they do best.
It also embraces the same codification that is responsible for the success of those
tools, making entire infrastructure deployments easy and reliable.

Terraform vs. CloudFormation, Heat, etc.


Tools like CloudFormation, Heat, etc. allow the details of an infrastructure to be
codified into a configuration file.
The configuration files allow the infrastructure to be elastically created, modified and
destroyed.
Terraform is inspired by the problems they solve.
Terraform similarly uses configuration files to detail the infrastructure setup, but it
goes further by being both cloud-agnostic and enabling multiple providers and
services to be combined and composed.
For example, Terraform can be used to orchestrate an AWS and OpenStack cluster
simultaneously, while enabling 3rd-party providers like Cloudflare and DNSimple to
be integrated to provide CDN and DNS services.
This enables Terraform to represent and manage the entire infrastructure with its
supporting services, instead of only the subset that exists within a single provider.
It provides a single unified syntax, instead of requiring operators to use independent
and non-interoperable tools for each platform and service.
Terraform also separates the planning phase from the execution phase, by using the
concept of an execution plan.
By running terraform plan, the current state is refreshed and the configuration is
consulted to generate an action plan.
The plan includes all actions to be taken: which resources will be created, destroyed or
modified.
It can be inspected by operators to ensure it is exactly what is expected.
Using terraform graph, the plan can be visualized to show dependent ordering.
Once the plan is captured, the execution phase can be limited to only the actions in
the plan.
Other tools combine the planning and execution phases, meaning operators are forced
to mentally reason about the effects of a change, which quickly becomes intractable in
large infrastructures.
Terraform lets operators apply changes with confidence, as they know exactly what
will happen beforehand.

Terraform vs. Boto, Fog, etc.


Libraries like Boto, Fog, etc. are used to provide native access to cloud providers and
services by using their APIs.
Some libraries are focused on specific clouds, while others attempt to bridge them all
and mask the semantic differences.
Using a client library only provides low-level access to APIs, requiring application
developers to create their own tooling to build and manage their infrastructure.
Terraform is not intended to give low-level programmatic access to providers, but
instead provides a high level syntax for describing how cloud resources and services
should be created, provisioned, and combined.
Terraform is very flexible, using a plugin-based model to support providers and
provisioners, giving it the ability to support almost any service that exposes APIs.

Terraform vs. Custom Solutions


Most organizations start by manually managing infrastructure through simple scripts
or web-based interfaces.
As the infrastructure grows, any manual approach to management becomes both
error-prone and tedious, and many organizations begin to home-roll tooling to help
automate the mechanical processes involved.
These tools require time and resources to build and maintain.
As tools of necessity, they represent the minimum viable features needed by an
organization, being built to handle only the immediate needs.
As a result, they are often hard to extend and difficult to maintain.
Because the tooling must be updated in lockstep with any new features or
infrastructure, it becomes the limiting factor for how quickly the infrastructure can
evolve.
Terraform is designed to tackle these challenges. It provides a simple, unified syntax,
allowing almost any resource to be managed without learning new tooling.
By capturing all the resources required, the dependencies between them can be
resolved automatically so that operators do not need to remember and reason about
them.
Removing the burden of building the tool allows operators to focus on their
infrastructure and not the tooling.
Furthermore, Terraform is an open source tool.
In addition to HashiCorp, the community around Terraform helps to extend its
features, fix bugs and document new use cases.
Terraform helps solve a problem that exists in every organization and provides a
standard that can be adopted to avoid reinventing the wheel between and within
organizations.
Its open source nature ensures it will be around in the long term.

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