Pallet vs Terraform: What are the differences?
Developers describe Pallet as "Automates controlling and provisioning cloud server instances. DevOps for the JVM". The machines being managed require no special dependencies to be installed. As long as they have bash and ssh running, they can be used with pallet. Pallet has no central server to set up and maintain - it simply runs on demand. You can run it from anywhere, even over a remote REPL connection. On the other hand, Terraform is detailed as "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.
Pallet and Terraform are primarily classified as "Server Configuration and Automation" and "Infrastructure Build" tools respectively.
Some of the features offered by Pallet are:
- Everything in Version Control
- Jar File Distribution of Crates
- Provisioning, Configuration and Administration
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.
Pallet and Terraform are both open source tools. It seems that Terraform with 17.7K GitHub stars and 4.83K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Pallet with 802 GitHub stars and 122 GitHub forks.
