Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!
Cloudify vs Terraform: What are the differences?
Introduction
Cloudify and Terraform are both powerful tools that are commonly used for infrastructure as code. While they serve similar purposes, there are key differences between the two that set them apart. In this article, we will explore the main differences between Cloudify and Terraform.
Provider Support: One of the notable differences between Cloudify and Terraform is the range of supported providers. Cloudify has a broader range of built-in provider support, allowing users to work with a variety of clouds, platforms, and tools. On the other hand, Terraform has a narrower focus on infrastructure provisioning and primarily supports industry-leading cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.
Language and Syntax: Another key difference lies in the language and syntax used by Cloudify and Terraform. Cloudify uses a declarative programming language called YAML, which is simple to understand and allows users to define the desired state of their infrastructure. Terraform, on the other hand, uses a domain-specific language (DSL) called HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL), which is designed specifically for infrastructure provisioning.
Maturity and Ecosystem: Cloudify has been in the market for a longer period of time, making it a more mature and established tool. It has a larger ecosystem with a wide range of plugins and extensions developed by the community. Terraform, on the other hand, has gained significant popularity in recent years, but it is considered to be a younger tool compared to Cloudify. However, Terraform benefits from being developed by HashiCorp, a well-known company in the DevOps and infrastructure automation space.
Orchestration Capabilities: Cloudify stands out with its advanced orchestration capabilities. It provides a rich set of features for orchestrating complex workflows, managing dependencies, and handling the coordination of different components in a distributed environment. While Terraform does support basic dependency management, it is primarily focused on provisioning infrastructure resources rather than orchestration.
Community and Support: Cloudify has a dedicated and active community that contributes to its development, provides support, and shares knowledge through forums, blogs, and other resources. Terraform also has a strong and vibrant community, benefiting from HashiCorp's reputation and the popularity of other tools in its ecosystem, such as Vagrant and Consul.
Integration with Other Tools: Both Cloudify and Terraform can integrate with other tools and frameworks to enhance their capabilities. However, Cloudify offers more out-of-the-box integrations with popular tools like Ansible, Puppet, and Kubernetes, allowing users to leverage existing investments and build comprehensive automation workflows. While Terraform does have some integrations, it is more focused on its core provisioning functionality.
In Summary, Cloudify offers broader provider support, advanced orchestration capabilities, and a more mature ecosystem. Terraform, on the other hand, has a narrower focus, a simpler language syntax, and benefits from being developed by HashiCorp. The choice between the two largely depends on the specific requirements, preferences, and existing infrastructure stack of the user.
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 Cloudify
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
Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions
Cons of Cloudify
Cons of Terraform
- Doesn't have full support to GKE1
Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions
What is Cloudify?
What is Terraform?
Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!
What companies use Cloudify?
What companies use Terraform?
Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions
What tools integrate with Cloudify?
What tools integrate with Terraform?
Sign up to get full access to all the tool integrationsMake informed product decisions
Blog Posts
+23
+13
+22+42