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Cloudcraft vs Terraform: What are the differences?
Introduction
When considering tools for managing infrastructure in the cloud, two popular options are Cloudcraft and Terraform. Although both tools serve similar purposes, they have key differences that set them apart.
Architecture Visualization: Cloudcraft specializes in creating visual representations of cloud architectures, allowing users to easily design and communicate complex infrastructure setups. On the other hand, Terraform focuses more on the actual deployment and management of infrastructure as code without a strong emphasis on visualization.
Infrastructure as Code Approach: Terraform is primarily an infrastructure as code (IaC) tool, meaning users can define and provision infrastructure using code. Cloudcraft, on the other hand, is more focused on providing a visual representation of the infrastructure and lacks advanced IaC features like Terraform.
Supported Cloud Platforms: Terraform supports a wide range of cloud platforms, including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and many others. Cloudcraft, however, specifically caters to AWS architecture visualization, limiting its scope to a single cloud provider.
Complexity and Learning Curve: Terraform is known for its flexibility and power, but this can also lead to a steeper learning curve for beginners. Cloudcraft, with its intuitive visual interface, is typically easier for newcomers to grasp and use without extensive technical knowledge.
Community and Ecosystem: Terraform boasts a large and active community, with a vast collection of pre-built modules and plugins available for users to leverage. Cloudcraft, being more specialized, has a smaller community and a narrower ecosystem of integrations and extensions.
In Summary, while Terraform excels in providing a flexible infrastructure as code solution with wide platform support and a robust community, Cloudcraft stands out for its architecture visualization capabilities and ease of use for AWS infrastructure design.
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.
We use Terraform to manage AWS cloud environment for the project. It is pretty complex, largely static, security-focused, and constantly evolving.
Terraform provides descriptive (declarative) way of defining the target configuration, where it can work out the dependencies between configuration elements and apply differences without re-provisioning the entire cloud stack.
AdvantagesTerraform is vendor-neutral in a way that it is using a common configuration language (HCL) with plugins (providers) for multiple cloud and service providers.
Terraform keeps track of the previous state of the deployment and applies incremental changes, resulting in faster deployment times.
Terraform allows us to share reusable modules between projects. We have built an impressive library of modules internally, which makes it very easy to assemble a new project from pre-fabricated building blocks.
DisadvantagesSoftware is imperfect, and Terraform is no exception. Occasionally we hit annoying bugs that we have to work around. The interaction with any underlying APIs is encapsulated inside 3rd party Terraform providers, and any bug fixes or new features require a provider release. Some providers have very poor coverage of the underlying APIs.
Terraform is not great for managing highly dynamic parts of cloud environments. That part is better delegated to other tools or scripts.
Terraform state may go out of sync with the target environment or with the source configuration, which often results in painful reconciliation.
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.
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
Pros of Cloudcraft
Pros of Terraform
- Infrastructure as code121
- Declarative syntax73
- Planning45
- Simple28
- Parallelism24
- Well-documented8
- Cloud agnostic8
- It's like coding your infrastructure in simple English6
- Immutable infrastructure6
- Platform agnostic5
- Extendable4
- Automation4
- Automates infrastructure deployments4
- Portability4
- Lightweight2
- Scales to hundreds of hosts2
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Cons of Cloudcraft
Cons of Terraform
- Doesn't have full support to GKE1
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What is Cloudcraft?
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