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Juju vs Terraform: What are the differences?
Introduction
In this Markdown code, we will explore the key differences between Juju and Terraform. Both Juju and Terraform are Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools, but they have distinct features that set them apart.
Ease of Use: Juju focuses on simplicity and ease of use. It utilizes a declarative approach, enabling users to describe the desired infrastructure state without specifying the detailed steps to achieve it. This makes it easier for beginners to get started and reduces the learning curve.
Multi-Cloud Support: Terraform provides robust support for multiple cloud providers, including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and many others. It allows users to manage infrastructure across multiple clouds using a single tool. Juju, on the other hand, has built-in cross-cloud compatibility, but its primary strength lies in managing applications and services rather than infrastructure.
Application-Centric Approach: Juju takes an application-centric approach to infrastructure management. It focuses on deploying and managing applications, allowing users to model and orchestrate complex systems easily. This makes it well-suited for managing complex, distributed applications.
Resource Provisioning: Terraform is primarily focused on resource provisioning and infrastructure deployment. It allows users to define infrastructure resources and their dependencies using a declarative language. Juju, on the other hand, is designed for application modeling and service orchestration, providing a higher-level abstraction for managing applications and services.
Integration with Existing Tools: Terraform offers extensive integration with various third-party tools and services. It provides a rich ecosystem of providers and modules that can be easily integrated into existing workflows. Juju also supports integration with external tools and services but is more tightly integrated with other elements of the Juju ecosystem.
Scope of Deployment: Juju is designed for managing complex, distributed systems and is well-suited for large-scale deployments. It provides advanced features like cross-model relations, which allow different applications to communicate and coordinate with each other. Terraform, on the other hand, is more focused on infrastructure provisioning and can be used for both simple and complex deployments.
In Summary, Juju and Terraform are both powerful Infrastructure as Code tools, but they have different strengths and focuses. Juju excels in managing applications and services, providing an application-centric approach and advanced features for complex deployments. Terraform, on the other hand, is primarily focused on resource provisioning and offers extensive multi-cloud support.
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 Juju
Pros of Terraform
- Infrastructure as code121
- 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 Juju
Cons of Terraform
- Doesn't have full support to GKE1
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