Terraform vs npm

Overview

npm

Stacks137.4K

Followers82.2K

Votes1.6K

GitHub Stars17.6K

Forks3.0K

Terraform

Stacks22.9K

Followers14.7K

Votes344

GitHub Stars47.0K

Forks10.1K

Terraform vs npm: What are the differences?

Introduction:
Terraform and npm are both widely used tools in the world of development and infrastructure management. While they serve different purposes, it’s important to understand the key differences between the two to make informed decisions in your projects.

1. **Language:** Terraform uses HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) to define infrastructure as code, while npm is a package manager for JavaScript.
2. **Purpose:** Terraform is primarily used for infrastructure provisioning and management, allowing users to define and automate cloud resources, whereas npm is used for managing packages and dependencies in Node.js projects.
3. **Community Support:** Terraform has a strong and active community that continuously contributes to the development of modules and plugins, while npm has a vast repository of packages maintained by the open-source community.
4. **Execution:** Terraform provisions infrastructure by creating execution plans and then applying changes, whereas npm installs and manages dependencies for Node.js projects, resolving version conflicts and ensuring compatibility.
5. **Versioning:** Terraform supports versioning at the infrastructure level, allowing users to track changes and roll back if necessary, whereas npm manages package versions within the project to ensure consistency and stability.
6. **Integration:** Terraform integrates with various cloud providers and services for managing resources across different platforms, while npm integrates seamlessly with Node.js projects for easy package management and deployment.

In Summary, understanding the key differences between Terraform and npm can help developers and operations teams effectively manage infrastructure and dependencies in their projects.

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CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Advice on npm, Terraform

Sung Won

Nov 4, 2019

Decidedon

Google Cloud IoT Core

Terraform

Python

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

2.25M views2.25M

Comments

Timothy

SRE

Mar 20, 2020

Decided

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.

385k views385k

Comments

StackShare

Apr 23, 2019

Needs adviceon

Node.js

npm

Yarn

From a StackShare Community member: “I’m a freelance web developer (I mostly use Node.js) and for future projects I’m debating between npm or Yarn as my default package manager. I’m a minimalist so I hate installing software if I don’t need to- in this case that would be Yarn. For those who made the switch from npm to Yarn, what benefits have you noticed? For those who stuck with npm, are you happy you with it?"

294k views294k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

npm	Terraform
npm is the command-line interface to the npm ecosystem. It is battle-tested, surprisingly flexible, and used by hundreds of thousands of JavaScript developers every day.	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.
-	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.;Change Automation: Complex changesets can be applied to your infrastructure with minimal human interaction. With the previously mentioned execution plan and resource graph, you know exactly what Terraform will change and in what order, avoiding many possible human errors
Statistics
GitHub Stars 17.6K	GitHub Stars 47.0K
GitHub Forks 3.0K	GitHub Forks 10.1K
Stacks 137.4K	Stacks 22.9K
Followers 82.2K	Followers 14.7K
Votes 1.6K	Votes 344
Pros & Cons
Pros 648 Best package management system for javascript 382 Open-source 327 Great community 148 More packages than rubygems, pypi, or packagist 112 Nice people matter Cons 5 Problems with lockfiles 5 Bad at package versioning and being deterministic 3 Node-gyp takes forever 1 Super slow	Pros 121 Infrastructure as code 73 Declarative syntax 45 Planning 28 Simple 24 Parallelism Cons 1 Doesn't have full support to GKE
Integrations
No integrations available	Heroku Amazon EC2 CloudFlare DNSimple Microsoft Azure Consul Equinix Metal DigitalOcean OpenStack Google Compute Engine

What are some alternatives to npm, Terraform?

Ansible

Ansible is an IT automation tool. It can configure systems, deploy software, and orchestrate more advanced IT tasks such as continuous deployments or zero downtime rolling updates. Ansible’s goals are foremost those of simplicity and maximum ease of use.

Chef

Chef enables you to manage and scale cloud infrastructure with no downtime or interruptions. Freely move applications and configurations from one cloud to another. Chef is integrated with all major cloud providers including Amazon EC2, VMWare, IBM Smartcloud, Rackspace, OpenStack, Windows Azure, HP Cloud, Google Compute Engine, Joyent Cloud and others.

RequireJS

RequireJS loads plain JavaScript files as well as more defined modules. It is optimized for in-browser use, including in a Web Worker, but it can be used in other JavaScript environments, like Rhino and Node. It implements the Asynchronous Module API. Using a modular script loader like RequireJS will improve the speed and quality of your code.

Browserify

Browserify lets you require('modules') in the browser by bundling up all of your dependencies.

Capistrano

Capistrano is a remote server automation tool. It supports the scripting and execution of arbitrary tasks, and includes a set of sane-default deployment workflows.

Puppet Labs

Puppet is an automated administrative engine for your Linux, Unix, and Windows systems and performs administrative tasks (such as adding users, installing packages, and updating server configurations) based on a centralized specification.

Salt

Salt is a new approach to infrastructure management. Easy enough to get running in minutes, scalable enough to manage tens of thousands of servers, and fast enough to communicate with them in seconds. Salt delivers a dynamic communication bus for infrastructures that can be used for orchestration, remote execution, configuration management and much more.

Yarn

Yarn caches every package it downloads so it never needs to again. It also parallelizes operations to maximize resource utilization so install times are faster than ever.

Fabric

Fabric is a Python (2.5-2.7) library and command-line tool for streamlining the use of SSH for application deployment or systems administration tasks. It provides a basic suite of operations for executing local or remote shell commands (normally or via sudo) and uploading/downloading files, as well as auxiliary functionality such as prompting the running user for input, or aborting execution.

AWS OpsWorks

Start from templates for common technologies like Ruby, Node.JS, PHP, and Java, or build your own using Chef recipes to install software packages and perform any task that you can script. AWS OpsWorks can scale your application using automatic load-based or time-based scaling and maintain the health of your application by detecting failed instances and replacing them. You have full control of deployments and automation of each component

Related Comparisons

Terraform vs npm: What are the differences?

Introduction:
Terraform and npm are both widely used tools in the world of development and infrastructure management. While they serve different purposes, it’s important to understand the key differences between the two to make informed decisions in your projects.

1. **Language:** Terraform uses HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) to define infrastructure as code, while npm is a package manager for JavaScript.
2. **Purpose:** Terraform is primarily used for infrastructure provisioning and management, allowing users to define and automate cloud resources, whereas npm is used for managing packages and dependencies in Node.js projects.
3. **Community Support:** Terraform has a strong and active community that continuously contributes to the development of modules and plugins, while npm has a vast repository of packages maintained by the open-source community.
4. **Execution:** Terraform provisions infrastructure by creating execution plans and then applying changes, whereas npm installs and manages dependencies for Node.js projects, resolving version conflicts and ensuring compatibility.
5. **Versioning:** Terraform supports versioning at the infrastructure level, allowing users to track changes and roll back if necessary, whereas npm manages package versions within the project to ensure consistency and stability.
6. **Integration:** Terraform integrates with various cloud providers and services for managing resources across different platforms, while npm integrates seamlessly with Node.js projects for easy package management and deployment.

In Summary, understanding the key differences between Terraform and npm can help developers and operations teams effectively manage infrastructure and dependencies in their projects.

Terraform vs npm

Overview

Terraform vs npm: What are the differences?

Share your Stack

Advice on npm, Terraform

Detailed Comparison

What are some alternatives to npm, Terraform?

Ansible

Chef

RequireJS

Browserify

Capistrano

Puppet Labs

Salt

Yarn

Fabric

AWS OpsWorks

Related Comparisons

Bitbucket vs GitHub vs GitLab

AWS CodeCommit vs Bitbucket vs GitHub

Docker Swarm vs Kubernetes vs Rancher

Grunt vs Webpack vs gulp

Grafana vs Graphite vs Kibana

Terraform vs npm

Overview

Terraform vs npm: What are the differences?

Share your Stack

Advice on npm, Terraform

Detailed Comparison

What are some alternatives to npm, Terraform?

Ansible

Chef

RequireJS

Browserify

Capistrano

Puppet Labs

Salt

Yarn

Fabric

AWS OpsWorks

Related Comparisons

Bitbucket vs GitHub vs GitLab

AWS CodeCommit vs Bitbucket vs GitHub

Docker Swarm vs Kubernetes vs Rancher

Grunt vs Webpack vs gulp

Grafana vs Graphite vs Kibana