Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!
DC/OS vs Terraform: What are the differences?
Considering the differences between DC/OS and Terraform:
Architecture: DC/OS is designed as an operating system for data centers and cloud environments, focusing on managing and scaling applications. On the other hand, Terraform is an infrastructure as code tool used for provisioning and managing infrastructure resources in a cloud environment.
Scope: DC/OS primarily focuses on container orchestration and application management, providing features like scheduling, scaling, and monitoring. In contrast, Terraform provides a broader scope by enabling the management of various infrastructure components such as compute instances, storage, and networking.
Abstraction Level: DC/OS operates at a higher level of abstraction, allowing users to focus more on application deployment and management tasks without worrying about underlying infrastructure details. Terraform, however, requires users to define the configuration of each infrastructure component explicitly, providing a more granular level of control.
Vendor Support: DC/OS is developed and maintained by D2iQ, formerly known as Mesosphere, offering enterprise support for the platform. Terraform, on the other hand, is an open-source tool maintained by HashiCorp, with support available through community forums and enterprise offerings.
Language: DC/OS configuration primarily involves using JSON or YAML files to define tasks, services, and other cluster resources. In contrast, Terraform uses HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) to define infrastructure resources, making it more readable and expressive for managing complex configurations.
State Management: DC/OS manages state internally within its cluster state, ensuring consistent application deployment and scaling. Terraform, however, utilizes a state file locally or remotely to track the current state of managed infrastructure resources, allowing for collaboration and versioning.
In Summary, DC/OS and Terraform differ in their architecture focus, scope, abstraction level, vendor support, configuration language, and state management approach.
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