AWS CloudFormation vs GoFormation vs Terraform: What are the differences?
# Introduction
Key differences between AWS CloudFormation, GoFormation, and Terraform are:
1. **Language Support**: AWS CloudFormation mainly uses JSON or YAML templates, while GoFormation allows users to use Go programming language along with JSON/YAML. Terraform uses its own configuration language called HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL).
2. **Provider Support**: AWS CloudFormation is specific to AWS services, while GoFormation is focused on generating CloudFormation templates programmatically. Terraform, on the other hand, supports multiple cloud providers and services, making it more versatile in managing different infrastructure environments.
3. **State Management**: AWS CloudFormation manages the state of the resources it provisions within the CloudFormation stack, while Terraform uses its state files to keep track of the infrastructure state. GoFormation's focus is on generating CloudFormation templates rather than managing states.
4. **Community and Ecosystem**: AWS CloudFormation has a strong ecosystem within the AWS community, offering a wide range of pre-built templates and resources. GoFormation, being a tool for generating CloudFormation templates, has a smaller community compared to Terraform, which has a large and active community with a broad range of third-party plugins and modules.
5. **Syntax and Flexibility**: AWS CloudFormation has predefined resource types and properties, limiting the flexibility in defining custom resources, while GoFormation allows more programmability and customization using Go language. Terraform, with its flexible HCL syntax, provides a high degree of flexibility and extensibility for defining infrastructure resources.
6. **Provisioning and Updates**: AWS CloudFormation manages resource provisioning and updates automatically based on the template definition, while GoFormation requires manual configuration and execution of the generated templates. Terraform provides automation for provisioning, updating, and destroying resources in a declarative manner with its plan and apply workflow.
In Summary, the key differences between AWS CloudFormation, GoFormation, and Terraform lie in their language support, provider support, state management, community and ecosystem, syntax and flexibility, and provisioning methods and updates.
