AWS CloudFormation vs Habitat vs Terraform: What are the differences?

1. Deployment Model: AWS CloudFormation is specific to the AWS cloud platform, while Habitat and Terraform are more platform agnostic, allowing deployment across multiple cloud providers and on-premises environments.

2. Configuration Management: Habitat focuses on application-level configuration management, providing native support for packaging, running, and updating applications. Terraform, on the other hand, primarily focuses on infrastructure configuration and provisioning, allowing users to define infrastructure as code.

3. Workflow Automation: AWS CloudFormation provides a template-based approach for automating infrastructure deployment, whereas Terraform offers a more modular and customizable workflow for managing infrastructure resources. Habitat, with its focus on packaging applications, streamlines the deployment and management of containerized applications.

4. Extensibility: Terraform has a vibrant community and ecosystem with numerous third-party providers and modules, making it highly extensible and adaptable to various use cases. Habitat, on the other hand, provides built-in capabilities for application automation and lifecycle management but may have limited integration options with external tools compared to Terraform.

5. Lifecycle Management: Habitat provides built-in features for managing the lifecycle of applications, including updates, scaling, and rollback capabilities, while Terraform primarily focuses on provisioning and configuring infrastructure resources. AWS CloudFormation offers a declarative approach to managing AWS resources but may require additional tools or processes for handling application lifecycle management.

6. Complexity: Terraform's infrastructure as code approach can lead to complex configurations and dependencies, especially in large-scale environments, whereas Habitat with its focus on application packaging and automation simplifies the deployment and management of applications. AWS CloudFormation falls in between, offering a balance between infrastructure and application management complexity.

In Summary, AWS CloudFormation is tightly integrated with AWS services, Habitat excels in application lifecycle management, and Terraform provides a flexible infrastructure as code solution with extensive community support.