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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Build Automation
  4. Infrastructure Build Tools
  5. AWS CloudFormation vs Habitat vs Terraform

AWS CloudFormation vs Habitat vs Terraform

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

AWS CloudFormation
AWS CloudFormation
Stacks1.6K
Followers1.3K
Votes88
Terraform
Terraform
Stacks22.9K
Followers14.7K
Votes344
GitHub Stars47.0K
Forks10.1K
Habitat
Habitat
Stacks34
Followers60
Votes5
GitHub Stars2.7K
Forks319

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.

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Detailed Comparison

AWS CloudFormation
AWS CloudFormation
Terraform
Terraform
Habitat
Habitat

You can use AWS CloudFormation’s sample templates or create your own templates to describe the AWS resources, and any associated dependencies or runtime parameters, required to run your application. You don’t need to figure out the order in which AWS services need to be provisioned or the subtleties of how to make those dependencies work.

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.

Habitat is a new approach to automation that focuses on the application instead of the infrastructure it runs on. With Habitat, the apps you build, deploy, and manage behave consistently in any runtime — metal, VMs, containers, and PaaS. You'll spend less time on the environment and more time building features.

AWS CloudFormation comes with the following ready-to-run sample templates: WordPress (blog),Tracks (project tracking), Gollum (wiki used by GitHub), Drupal (content management), Joomla (content management), Insoshi (social apps), Redmine (project mgmt);No Need to Reinvent the Wheel – A template can be used repeatedly to create identical copies of the same stack (or to use as a foundation to start a new stack);Transparent and Open – Templates are simple JSON formatted text files that can be placed under your normal source control mechanisms, stored in private or public locations such as Amazon S3 and exchanged via email.;Declarative and Flexible – To create the infrastructure you want, you enumerate what AWS resources, configuration values and interconnections you need in a template and then let AWS CloudFormation do the rest with a few simple clicks in the AWS Management Console, via the command line tools or by calling the APIs.
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.;Change Automation: Complex changesets can be applied to your infrastructure with minimal human interaction. With the previously mentioned execution plan and resource graph, you know exactly what Terraform will change and in what order, avoiding many possible human errors
-
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
47.0K
GitHub Stars
2.7K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
10.1K
GitHub Forks
319
Stacks
1.6K
Stacks
22.9K
Stacks
34
Followers
1.3K
Followers
14.7K
Followers
60
Votes
88
Votes
344
Votes
5
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 43
    Automates infrastructure deployments
  • 21
    Declarative infrastructure and deployment
  • 13
    No more clicking around
  • 3
    Any Operative System you want
  • 3
    Infrastructure as code
Cons
  • 4
    Brittle
  • 2
    No RBAC and policies in templates
Pros
  • 121
    Infrastructure as code
  • 73
    Declarative syntax
  • 45
    Planning
  • 28
    Simple
  • 24
    Parallelism
Cons
  • 1
    Doesn't have full support to GKE
Pros
  • 2
    Easy to use
  • 1
    Cross platform builds
  • 1
    Lightweight
  • 1
    Supervisor is great concept
Integrations
No integrations available
Heroku
Heroku
Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2
CloudFlare
CloudFlare
DNSimple
DNSimple
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure
Consul
Consul
Equinix Metal
Equinix Metal
DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean
OpenStack
OpenStack
Google Compute Engine
Google Compute Engine
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure
Chef
Chef
rkt
rkt
Nomad
Nomad
Google App Engine
Google App Engine
Docker
Docker
Mesosphere
Mesosphere
Kubernetes
Kubernetes
Google Compute Engine
Google Compute Engine
VMware vSphere
VMware vSphere

What are some alternatives to AWS CloudFormation, Terraform, Habitat?

Ansible

Ansible

Ansible is an IT automation tool. It can configure systems, deploy software, and orchestrate more advanced IT tasks such as continuous deployments or zero downtime rolling updates. Ansible’s goals are foremost those of simplicity and maximum ease of use.

Chef

Chef

Chef enables you to manage and scale cloud infrastructure with no downtime or interruptions. Freely move applications and configurations from one cloud to another. Chef is integrated with all major cloud providers including Amazon EC2, VMWare, IBM Smartcloud, Rackspace, OpenStack, Windows Azure, HP Cloud, Google Compute Engine, Joyent Cloud and others.

Capistrano

Capistrano

Capistrano is a remote server automation tool. It supports the scripting and execution of arbitrary tasks, and includes a set of sane-default deployment workflows.

Puppet Labs

Puppet Labs

Puppet is an automated administrative engine for your Linux, Unix, and Windows systems and performs administrative tasks (such as adding users, installing packages, and updating server configurations) based on a centralized specification.

Salt

Salt

Salt is a new approach to infrastructure management. Easy enough to get running in minutes, scalable enough to manage tens of thousands of servers, and fast enough to communicate with them in seconds. Salt delivers a dynamic communication bus for infrastructures that can be used for orchestration, remote execution, configuration management and much more.

Fabric

Fabric

Fabric is a Python (2.5-2.7) library and command-line tool for streamlining the use of SSH for application deployment or systems administration tasks. It provides a basic suite of operations for executing local or remote shell commands (normally or via sudo) and uploading/downloading files, as well as auxiliary functionality such as prompting the running user for input, or aborting execution.

AWS OpsWorks

AWS OpsWorks

Start from templates for common technologies like Ruby, Node.JS, PHP, and Java, or build your own using Chef recipes to install software packages and perform any task that you can script. AWS OpsWorks can scale your application using automatic load-based or time-based scaling and maintain the health of your application by detecting failed instances and replacing them. You have full control of deployments and automation of each component

Packer

Packer

Packer automates the creation of any type of machine image. It embraces modern configuration management by encouraging you to use automated scripts to install and configure the software within your Packer-made images.

Scalr

Scalr

Scalr is a remote state & operations backend for Terraform with access controls, policy as code, and many quality of life features.

Pulumi

Pulumi

Pulumi is a cloud development platform that makes creating cloud programs easy and productive. Skip the YAML and just write code. Pulumi is multi-language, multi-cloud and fully extensible in both its engine and ecosystem of packages.

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