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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Continuous Deployment
  4. Server Configuration And Automation
  5. GoFormation vs Pulumi vs Terraform

GoFormation vs Pulumi vs Terraform

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Terraform
Terraform
Stacks22.9K
Followers14.7K
Votes344
GitHub Stars47.0K
Forks10.1K
GoFormation
GoFormation
Stacks3
Followers7
Votes0
GitHub Stars849
Forks199
Pulumi
Pulumi
Stacks307
Followers293
Votes25
GitHub Stars24.1K
Forks1.3K

GoFormation vs Pulumi vs Terraform: What are the differences?

  1. Syntax and Language Support: Pulumi supports full programming languages like TypeScript, Python, Go, and .NET, allowing users to write infrastructure as code in syntax they are comfortable with, while Terraform uses HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) and GoFormation supports JSON or YAML syntax only.
  2. State management: Pulumi uses a state backend that can be stored in various cloud providers like AWS S3 or Azure Blob Storage, while Terraform uses its own backend for state management and GoFormation does not directly provide state management functionality.
  3. Workflow: Pulumi enables real-time updates to infrastructure resources when code changes are made, offering a quick feedback loop, whereas Terraform requires users to run "terraform apply" after changes and GoFormation operates in a similar way as Terraform.
  4. Community and Ecosystem: Terraform has a larger community and ecosystem compared to Pulumi and GoFormation due to its longer presence in the market, which results in more resources, modules, and documentation readily available for users.
  5. Versioning and Releases: Pulumi frequently releases new versions and updates with features and improvements, while Terraform has a more structured release cycle and GoFormation has a lesser frequency of updates and releases compared to the other two tools.
  6. Vendor Lock-in: Pulumi provides a clear pathway to transition to raw CloudFormation, enabling users to avoid vendor lock-in, while Terraform requires additional effort to transition to other infrastructure as code tools, and GoFormation is tightly bound to its JSON and YAML syntax without an easy transition pathway.

In Summary, the key differences between GoFormation, Pulumi, and Terraform lie in their syntax and language support, state management, workflow, community and ecosystem, versioning and releases, and vendor lock-in.

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Detailed Comparison

Terraform
Terraform
GoFormation
GoFormation
Pulumi
Pulumi

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.

GoFormation is a Go library for working with AWS CloudFormation / AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) templates.

Pulumi is a cloud development platform that makes creating cloud programs easy and productive. Skip the YAML and just write code. Pulumi is multi-language, multi-cloud and fully extensible in both its engine and ecosystem of packages.

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
-
Containers - Deploy a Docker container to production in 5 minutes using your favorite orchestrator.; Serverless - Stand up a serverless API or event handler in 5 minutes using a real lambda in code.; Infrastructure - Manage cloud infrastructure or hosted services using infrastructure as code.; CoLaDa - Embrace containers, lambdas, and data, using a modern, multi-cloud framework.
Statistics
GitHub Stars
47.0K
GitHub Stars
849
GitHub Stars
24.1K
GitHub Forks
10.1K
GitHub Forks
199
GitHub Forks
1.3K
Stacks
22.9K
Stacks
3
Stacks
307
Followers
14.7K
Followers
7
Followers
293
Votes
344
Votes
0
Votes
25
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 121
    Infrastructure as code
  • 73
    Declarative syntax
  • 45
    Planning
  • 28
    Simple
  • 24
    Parallelism
Cons
  • 1
    Doesn't have full support to GKE
No community feedback yet
Pros
  • 8
    Infrastructure as code with less pain
  • 4
    Best-in-class kubernetes support
  • 3
    Simple
  • 3
    Can use many languages
  • 2
    Great CLI
Integrations
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
AWS CloudFormation
AWS CloudFormation
Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2
Golang
Golang
No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Terraform, GoFormation, Pulumi?

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.

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.

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.

Salt

Salt

Salt is a new approach to infrastructure management. Easy enough to get running in minutes, scalable enough to manage tens of thousands of servers, and fast enough to communicate with them in seconds. Salt delivers a dynamic communication bus for infrastructures that can be used for orchestration, remote execution, configuration management and much more.

AWS CloudFormation

AWS CloudFormation

You can use AWS CloudFormation’s sample templates or create your own templates to describe the AWS resources, and any associated dependencies or runtime parameters, required to run your application. You don’t need to figure out the order in which AWS services need to be provisioned or the subtleties of how to make those dependencies work.

Fabric

Fabric

Fabric is a Python (2.5-2.7) library and command-line tool for streamlining the use of SSH for application deployment or systems administration tasks. It provides a basic suite of operations for executing local or remote shell commands (normally or via sudo) and uploading/downloading files, as well as auxiliary functionality such as prompting the running user for input, or aborting execution.

AWS OpsWorks

AWS OpsWorks

Start from templates for common technologies like Ruby, Node.JS, PHP, and Java, or build your own using Chef recipes to install software packages and perform any task that you can script. AWS OpsWorks can scale your application using automatic load-based or time-based scaling and maintain the health of your application by detecting failed instances and replacing them. You have full control of deployments and automation of each component

Packer

Packer

Packer automates the creation of any type of machine image. It embraces modern configuration management by encouraging you to use automated scripts to install and configure the software within your Packer-made images.

Scalr

Scalr

Scalr is a remote state & operations backend for Terraform with access controls, policy as code, and many quality of life features.

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