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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Continuous Integration
  4. Continuous Integration
  5. Drone.io vs Terraform

Drone.io vs Terraform

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Drone.io
Drone.io
Stacks884
Followers456
Votes258
Terraform
Terraform
Stacks22.9K
Followers14.7K
Votes344
GitHub Stars47.0K
Forks10.1K

Drone.io vs Terraform: What are the differences?

# Introduction
In this comparison, we will outline the key differences between Drone.io and Terraform.

1. **Targeted Use Case**: Drone.io primarily focuses on continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) processes, providing a platform for automating build, test, and deployment pipelines. In contrast, Terraform is an infrastructure as code tool used for provisioning and managing infrastructure resources in a declarative way. While both tools can be integrated into a CI/CD pipeline, Drone.io is more oriented towards the automation of software delivery workflows.

2. **Configuration Language**: Drone.io utilizes a simple and intuitive YAML configuration file for defining pipelines and steps in the CI/CD process, making it easy for developers to understand and modify. On the other hand, Terraform uses HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) or JSON for defining infrastructure resources and dependencies, providing a more structured approach for infrastructure provisioning. The choice of configuration language can impact the learning curve and flexibility of the tool.

3. **Scalability and Extensibility**: Terraform is designed to manage infrastructure across different cloud providers and services, allowing for multi-cloud deployments and complex infrastructure architectures. It offers a wide range of providers and modules that can be extended to support various use cases. In comparison, Drone.io is more focused on automating build and deployment processes within a specific project or organization, limiting the scope of its scalability and extensibility in managing infrastructure resources.

4. **State Management**: Terraform uses state files to keep track of the current state of infrastructure resources and manage updates and changes to the infrastructure. This allows Terraform to plan and apply changes efficiently and maintain consistency across deployments. In contrast, Drone.io does not handle state management for infrastructure provisioning, as its primary goal is to automate software delivery pipelines and CI/CD workflows without managing infrastructure configurations.

5. **Community and Ecosystem**: Terraform has a larger community and ecosystem of users, contributors, and providers, offering a wide range of resources, modules, and best practices for infrastructure automation. This extensive community support makes it easier to troubleshoot issues, collaborate on projects, and leverage existing solutions. On the other hand, Drone.io has a smaller but active community focused on CI/CD practices, providing support for building, testing, and deploying software applications efficiently.

In Summary, the key differences between Drone.io and Terraform lie in their targeted use cases, configuration languages, scalability, state management, and community ecosystems.

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Advice on Drone.io, Terraform

Sung Won
Sung Won

Nov 4, 2019

DecidedonGoogle Cloud IoT CoreGoogle Cloud IoT CoreTerraformTerraformPythonPython

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
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
Somnath
Somnath

Engineering Leader at Altimetrik Corp.

Jun 25, 2020

Needs adviceonCircleCICircleCIDrone.ioDrone.ioGitHub ActionsGitHub Actions

I am in the process of evaluating CircleCI, Drone.io, and GitHub Actions to cover my #CI/ #CD needs. I would appreciate your advice on comparative study w.r.t. attributes like language-Inclusive support, code-base integration, performance, cost, maintenance, support, ease of use, ability to deal with big projects, etc. based on actual industry experience.

Thanks in advance!

1.82M views1.82M
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Drone.io
Drone.io
Terraform
Terraform

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.

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.

Free for open-source;GitHub, BitBucket integration;Browser testing;Deplot with Amazon, Heroku, Google AppEngine;Flexible scripting;Team billing;
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
884
Stacks
22.9K
Followers
456
Followers
14.7K
Votes
258
Votes
344
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 51
    Open source
  • 50
    Built on docker
  • 27
    Free for open source
  • 23
    GitHub integration
  • 18
    Easy Setup
Cons
  • 3
    Very basic documentation
Pros
  • 121
    Infrastructure as code
  • 73
    Declarative syntax
  • 45
    Planning
  • 28
    Simple
  • 24
    Parallelism
Cons
  • 1
    Doesn't have full support to GKE
Integrations
Docker
Docker
Bitbucket
Bitbucket
Google App Engine
Google App Engine
Heroku
Heroku
GitHub
GitHub
Amazon S3
Amazon S3
dotCloud
dotCloud
Heroku
Heroku
Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2
CloudFlare
CloudFlare
DNSimple
DNSimple
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure
Consul
Consul
Equinix Metal
Equinix Metal
DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean
OpenStack
OpenStack
Google Compute Engine
Google Compute Engine

What are some alternatives to Drone.io, Terraform?

Jenkins

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

wercker

wercker

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

Capistrano

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.

Puppet Labs

Puppet Labs

Puppet is an automated administrative engine for your Linux, Unix, and Windows systems and performs administrative tasks (such as adding users, installing packages, and updating server configurations) based on a centralized specification.

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