Buildkite vs Terraform

Overview

Buildkite

Stacks210

Followers231

Votes115

Terraform

Stacks22.9K

Followers14.7K

Votes344

GitHub Stars47.0K

Forks10.1K

Buildkite vs Terraform: What are the differences?

Workflow automation: Buildkite focuses on automating the continuous integration and deployment workflow, providing a platform for managing pipelines, whereas Terraform is primarily meant for provisioning and managing infrastructure as code by defining the desired state configuration.
Version control integration: Buildkite seamlessly integrates with version control systems like GitHub, Bitbucket, and GitLab, allowing developers to trigger builds based on code changes, while Terraform primarily interacts with cloud providers' APIs to create and manage infrastructure resources.
Job scheduling and resource allocation: Buildkite allows for granular control over job scheduling and resource allocation within pipelines, facilitating better resource utilization and execution order, whereas Terraform is limited in terms of job orchestration and focuses more on infrastructure provisioning and configuration management.
Extensibility and plugin ecosystem: Buildkite provides a robust plugin ecosystem that allows users to extend functionality and integrate with third-party tools, offering flexibility in customizing workflows, while Terraform's extensibility is more centered around providers and modules for managing cloud resources.
User interface and visualization: Buildkite offers a user-friendly interface for monitoring build progress, viewing logs, and analyzing pipeline performance, providing insights into each stage of the CI/CD process, whereas Terraform's user interface is more command-line driven and focused on displaying resource configurations and state changes.
Community support and documentation: Buildkite has a vibrant community with active support channels, extensive documentation, and tutorials for getting started, enabling users to quickly troubleshoot issues and leverage best practices, whereas Terraform also has a strong community backing but is primarily known for its documentation and official guides.

In Summary, Buildkite and Terraform differ in their focus on workflow automation, version control integration, job scheduling, extensibility, user interface, and community support.

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Advice on Buildkite, Terraform

Sung Won

Nov 4, 2019

Decidedon

Google Cloud IoT Core

Terraform

Python

Context: I wanted to create an end to end IoT data pipeline simulation in Google Cloud IoT Core and other GCP services. I never touched Terraform meaningfully until working on this project, and it's one of the best explorations in my development career. The documentation and syntax is incredibly human-readable and friendly. I'm used to building infrastructure through the google apis via Python , but I'm so glad past Sung did not make that decision. I was tempted to use Google Cloud Deployment Manager, but the templates were a bit convoluted by first impression. I'm glad past Sung did not make this decision either.

Solution: Leveraging Google Cloud Build Google Cloud Run Google Cloud Bigtable Google BigQuery Google Cloud Storage Google Compute Engine along with some other fun tools, I can deploy over 40 GCP resources using Terraform!

Check Out My Architecture: CLICK ME

Check out the GitHub repo attached

2.25M views2.25M

Comments

Timothy

SRE

Mar 20, 2020

Decided

I personally am not a huge fan of vendor lock in for multiple reasons:

I've seen cost saving moves to the cloud end up costing a fortune and trapping companies due to over utilization of cloud specific features.
I've seen S3 failures nearly take down half the internet.
I've seen companies get stuck in the cloud because they aren't built cloud agnostic.

I choose to use terraform for my cloud provisioning for these reasons:

It's cloud agnostic so I can use it no matter where I am.
It isn't difficult to use and uses a relatively easy to read language.
It tests infrastructure before running it, and enables me to see and keep changes up to date.
It runs from the same CLI I do most of my CM work from.

385k views385k

Comments

Daniel

May 4, 2020

Decided

Because Pulumi uses real programming languages, you can actually write abstractions for your infrastructure code, which is incredibly empowering. You still 'describe' your desired state, but by having a programming language at your fingers, you can factor out patterns, and package it up for easier consumption.

426k views426k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Buildkite	Terraform
CI and build automation tool that combines the power of your own build infrastructure with the convenience of a managed, centralized web UI. Used by Shopify, Basecamp, Digital Ocean, Venmo, Cochlear, Bugsnag and more.	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.
Fast and stable builds; Open source agent runs on almost any machine and architecture; Freedom to use your own internal or pre-release tools and services; Powerful distributed build tools; Key/value targeting of agents; Dynamic job allocation allows adding and removing build machines; Shared key/value and binary artifact stores for easily distributing build jobs regardless of machine or network; Integration with pull requests, deployments and releases; GitHub, Github Enterprise, Bitbucket, Gitlab or your own SCM; Slack, Hipchat, Webhooks, and LIFX notifications; Extensible per-project with agent hooks, webhooks and the rest API; GitHub Enterprise is supported standard; SSO	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 Forks -	GitHub Forks 10.1K
Stacks 210	Stacks 22.9K
Followers 231	Followers 14.7K
Votes 115	Votes 344
Pros & Cons
Pros 18 Great customer support 17 Github integration 16 Easy to use 16 Easy setup 12 Simplicity	Pros 121 Infrastructure as code 73 Declarative syntax 45 Planning 28 Simple 24 Parallelism Cons 1 Doesn't have full support to GKE
Integrations
Slack GitHub Docker GitLab Heroku HipChat Bitbucket Git GitHub Enterprise TestFlight	Heroku Amazon EC2 CloudFlare DNSimple Microsoft Azure Consul Equinix Metal DigitalOcean OpenStack Google Compute Engine

What are some alternatives to Buildkite, Terraform?

Jenkins

In a nutshell Jenkins CI is the leading open-source continuous integration server. Built with Java, it provides over 300 plugins to support building and testing virtually any project.

Travis CI

Free for open source projects, our CI environment provides multiple runtimes (e.g. Node.js or PHP versions), data stores and so on. Because of this, hosting your project on travis-ci.com means you can effortlessly test your library or applications against multiple runtimes and data stores without even having all of them installed locally.

Codeship

Codeship runs your automated tests and configured deployment when you push to your repository. It takes care of managing and scaling the infrastructure so that you are able to test and release more frequently and get faster feedback for building the product your users need.

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.

CircleCI

Continuous integration and delivery platform helps software teams rapidly release code with confidence by automating the build, test, and deploy process. Offers a modern software development platform that lets teams ramp.

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.

TeamCity

TeamCity is a user-friendly continuous integration (CI) server for professional developers, build engineers, and DevOps. It is trivial to setup and absolutely free for small teams and open source projects.

Drone.io

Drone is a hosted continuous integration service. It enables you to conveniently set up projects to automatically build, test, and deploy as you make changes to your code. Drone integrates seamlessly with Github, Bitbucket and Google Code as well as third party services such as Heroku, Dotcloud, Google AppEngine and more.

wercker

Wercker is a CI/CD developer automation platform designed for Microservices & Container Architecture.

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.

Related Comparisons

Buildkite vs Terraform: What are the differences?

Workflow automation: Buildkite focuses on automating the continuous integration and deployment workflow, providing a platform for managing pipelines, whereas Terraform is primarily meant for provisioning and managing infrastructure as code by defining the desired state configuration.
Version control integration: Buildkite seamlessly integrates with version control systems like GitHub, Bitbucket, and GitLab, allowing developers to trigger builds based on code changes, while Terraform primarily interacts with cloud providers' APIs to create and manage infrastructure resources.
Job scheduling and resource allocation: Buildkite allows for granular control over job scheduling and resource allocation within pipelines, facilitating better resource utilization and execution order, whereas Terraform is limited in terms of job orchestration and focuses more on infrastructure provisioning and configuration management.
Extensibility and plugin ecosystem: Buildkite provides a robust plugin ecosystem that allows users to extend functionality and integrate with third-party tools, offering flexibility in customizing workflows, while Terraform's extensibility is more centered around providers and modules for managing cloud resources.
User interface and visualization: Buildkite offers a user-friendly interface for monitoring build progress, viewing logs, and analyzing pipeline performance, providing insights into each stage of the CI/CD process, whereas Terraform's user interface is more command-line driven and focused on displaying resource configurations and state changes.
Community support and documentation: Buildkite has a vibrant community with active support channels, extensive documentation, and tutorials for getting started, enabling users to quickly troubleshoot issues and leverage best practices, whereas Terraform also has a strong community backing but is primarily known for its documentation and official guides.

In Summary, Buildkite and Terraform differ in their focus on workflow automation, version control integration, job scheduling, extensibility, user interface, and community support.

Buildkite vs Terraform

Overview