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Hashicorp Sentinel vs Terraform: What are the differences?
Introduction:
1. Integration with Terraform: HashiCorp Sentinel allows you to add policy as code enforcement to your Terraform plans and deployments, ensuring compliance and security at every stage of the infrastructure lifecycle. This integration helps in making sure that only compliant infrastructure configurations are applied.
2. Policy as Code vs. Infrastructure as Code: While Terraform focuses on defining and managing infrastructure as code, Sentinel focuses on defining and enforcing policy as code. This means that Terraform creates and manages infrastructure, while Sentinel ensures that the defined policies are adhered to during the provisioning process.
3. Granular Control: Sentinel provides more granular control over policies by enabling conditional checks, parameterized policies, and the ability to define policies based on specific criteria. This level of control allows organizations to tailor policies to their specific requirements and enforce them effectively.
4. Real-Time Observability: Sentinel offers real-time observability by providing detailed insights into policy evaluation, allowing users to track and monitor policy compliance during Terraform execution. This feature helps in identifying and addressing policy violations promptly, enhancing the security and compliance of the infrastructure.
5. Customization and Extensibility: Sentinel allows users to create custom functions, imports, and data sources to extend the capabilities of policy enforcement. This customization enables organizations to implement unique policies and integrations to meet their specific infrastructure requirements effectively.
6. Compliance Automation: HashiCorp Sentinel streamlines compliance automation by integrating with various compliance standards and frameworks, allowing organizations to automate policy enforcement and compliance checking seamlessly within their Terraform workflows.
In Summary, HashiCorp Sentinel and Terraform differ in their focus on policy as code enforcement, granular control, real-time observability, customization, and compliance automation within the infrastructure lifecycle.
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 Hashicorp Sentinel
Pros of Terraform
- Infrastructure as code122
- 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
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Cons of Hashicorp Sentinel
Cons of Terraform
- Doesn't have full support to GKE1
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