Koding vs Terraform: What are the differences?
What is Koding? A new way for developers to work. Koding is a feature rich cloud-based development environment complete with free VMs, an attractive IDE & sudo level terminal access!.
What is Terraform? 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.
Koding belongs to "Cloud IDE" category of the tech stack, while Terraform can be primarily classified under "Infrastructure Build Tools".
Some of the features offered by Koding are:
- Free virtual machine (VM) with Ubuntu, root access, apt-get, and many commonly used tools
- Built-in Terminal with 256-color support
- All languages, databases, and command-line tools are supported
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.
"Free" is the top reason why over 35 developers like Koding, while over 80 developers mention "Infrastructure as code" as the leading cause for choosing Terraform.
Terraform is an open source tool with 17.4K GitHub stars and 4.77K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Terraform's open source repository on GitHub.