Nomad vs Terraform: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this article, we will explore and compare the key differences between Nomad and Terraform. Both tools are widely used in the field of infrastructure deployment and automation, but they have distinct features and purposes.

1. Orchestration vs Infrastructure-as-Code: The primary difference between Nomad and Terraform lies in their core functionality. Nomad is an orchestration tool, designed to schedule and manage applications across a distributed infrastructure. On the other hand, Terraform is an infrastructure-as-code tool used to provision and manage infrastructure resources across various cloud providers.

2. Focus on Application vs Infrastructure: Nomad focuses on deploying and managing applications, while Terraform primarily deals with creating and managing infrastructure resources. Nomad provides a high-level abstraction to deploy applications and handle workload scheduling, whereas Terraform allows defining and managing infrastructure components such as virtual machines, databases, and networking resources.

3. Native vs Provider-based Integrations: Nomad natively integrates with various container runtimes and schedulers like Docker, Kubernetes, and VirtualBox. It provides a native API for scheduling and running workloads. In contrast, Terraform provides flexible integrations with a wide range of cloud providers through provider plugins. It allows managing resources offered by providers like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and more.

4. State Management: Nomad primarily manages the state of running applications and workload scheduling, but it does not maintain a state of the infrastructure. On the other hand, Terraform builds and maintains a state file that tracks the resources it creates, updates, or destroys. This state file allows Terraform to understand the current state of the infrastructure and intelligently plan and execute changes.

5. Granularity of Control: Nomad provides more granular control over workload scheduling and resource placement decisions. It supports powerful placement constraints to control where tasks are scheduled, affinity and anti-affinity rules, and advanced scheduling parameters. In contrast, Terraform focuses on declarative provisioning of infrastructure resources without granular control over how resources are placed or scheduled.

6. Community and Ecosystem: Both Nomad and Terraform have vibrant communities and ecosystems that contribute to their respective tools. However, Terraform has a larger community and ecosystem due to its broader adoption and focus on infrastructure provisioning. It has a vast number of official and community-maintained providers, modules, and plugins, making it easier to leverage existing code and configurations for various infrastructure setups.

In summary, Nomad is an orchestration tool focused on application deployment and workload scheduling, while Terraform is an infrastructure-as-code tool primarily used for provisioning and managing infrastructure resources. Nomad provides native support for container runtimes and schedulers, offers granular control over workload placement, and manages application state. Terraform, on the other hand, integrates with various cloud providers, allows infrastructure provisioning through provider plugins, manages infrastructure state, and has a wide variety of official and community-driven resources and modules.