Buildbot vs Terraform: What are the differences?
Buildbot: Python-based continuous integration testing framework. BuildBot is a system to automate the compile/test cycle required by most software projects to validate code changes. By automatically rebuilding and testing the tree each time something has changed, build problems are pinpointed quickly, before other developers are inconvenienced by the failure; Terraform: 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.
Buildbot can be classified as a tool in the "Continuous Integration" category, while Terraform is grouped under "Infrastructure Build Tools".
Some of the features offered by Buildbot are:
- run builds on a variety of slave platforms
- arbitrary build process: handles projects using C, Python, whatever
- minimal host requirements: Python and Twisted
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.
"Highly configurable builds" is the top reason why over 8 developers like Buildbot, while over 80 developers mention "Infrastructure as code" as the leading cause for choosing Terraform.
Buildbot and Terraform are both open source tools. Terraform with 17.4K GitHub stars and 4.77K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Buildbot with 3.98K GitHub stars and 1.36K GitHub forks.
According to the StackShare community, Terraform has a broader approval, being mentioned in 490 company stacks & 298 developers stacks; compared to Buildbot, which is listed in 7 company stacks and 6 developer stacks.
