gulp vs Terraform: What are the differences?
Developers describe gulp as "The streaming build system". Build system automating tasks: minification and copying of all JavaScript files, static images. More capable of watching files to automatically rerun the task when a file changes. On the other hand, Terraform is detailed as "Describe your complete infrastructure as code and build resources across providers". 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.
gulp can be classified as a tool in the "JS Build Tools / JS Task Runners" category, while Terraform is grouped under "Infrastructure Build Tools".
Some of the features offered by gulp are:
- By preferring code over configuration, gulp keeps simple things simple and makes complex tasks manageable.
- By harnessing the power of node's streams you get fast builds that don't write intermediary files to disk.
- gulp's strict plugin guidelines assure plugins stay simple and work the way you expect.
On the other hand, Terraform provides the following key features:
- 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.
"Build speed" is the top reason why over 454 developers like gulp, while over 80 developers mention "Infrastructure as code" as the leading cause for choosing Terraform.
gulp and Terraform are both open source tools. It seems that gulp with 31.3K GitHub stars and 4.4K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Terraform with 17.4K GitHub stars and 4.77K GitHub forks.
AdRoll, GoSquared, and CrowdFlower are some of the popular companies that use gulp, whereas Terraform is used by Uber Technologies, Instacart, and 9GAG. gulp has a broader approval, being mentioned in 1158 company stacks & 690 developers stacks; compared to Terraform, which is listed in 490 company stacks and 298 developer stacks.
