Apache Aurora vs Terraform

Apache Aurora vs Terraform: What are the differences?

Developers describe Apache Aurora as "An Apcahe Mesos framework for scheduling jobs, originally developed by Twitter". Apache Aurora is a service scheduler that runs on top of Mesos, enabling you to run long-running services that take advantage of Mesos' scalability, fault-tolerance, and resource isolation. On the other hand, Terraform is detailed as "Describe your complete infrastructure as code and build resources across providers". With Terraform, you describe your complete infrastructure as code, even as it spans multiple service providers. Your servers may come from AWS, your DNS may come from CloudFlare, and your database may come from Heroku. Terraform will build all these resources across all these providers in parallel.

Apache Aurora and Terraform are primarily classified as "Cluster Management" and "Infrastructure Build" tools respectively.

Some of the features offered by Apache Aurora are:

• Deployment and scheduling of jobs
• The abstraction a “job” to bundle and manage Mesos tasks
• A rich DSL to define services

On the other hand, Terraform provides the following key features:

• Infrastructure as Code: Infrastructure is described using a high-level configuration syntax. This allows a blueprint of your datacenter to be versioned and treated as you would any other code. Additionally, infrastructure can be shared and re-used.
• Execution Plans: Terraform has a "planning" step where it generates an execution plan. The execution plan shows what Terraform will do when you call apply. This lets you avoid any surprises when Terraform manipulates infrastructure.
• Resource Graph: Terraform builds a graph of all your resources, and parallelizes the creation and modification of any non-dependent resources. Because of this, Terraform builds infrastructure as efficiently as possible, and operators get insight into dependencies in their infrastructure.

Apache Aurora and Terraform are both open source tools. Terraform with 26.4K GitHub stars and 6.54K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Apache Aurora with 621 GitHub stars and 240 GitHub forks.

Uber Technologies, Udemy, and Slack are some of the popular companies that use Terraform, whereas Apache Aurora is used by Twitter, KAVAK, and Oscar Health. Terraform has a broader approval, being mentioned in 1372 company stacks & 7409 developers stacks; compared to Apache Aurora, which is listed in 9 company stacks and 48 developer stacks.