Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!
Portainer vs Terraform: What are the differences?
Key Differences between Portainer and Terraform
Portainer and Terraform are two widely used tools in the world of DevOps and infrastructure management. While they both serve a similar purpose of managing and provisioning infrastructure, there are some key differences between the two.
User Interface vs. Infrastructure as Code: Portainer provides a user-friendly web-based interface that allows users to visually manage their Docker environments. It simplifies tasks like container deployment, monitoring, and scaling. On the other hand, Terraform is an infrastructure as code tool that allows users to define their infrastructure using declarative configuration files. It supports multiple cloud providers and can be used to automate the provisioning and management of infrastructure resources.
Scope of Management: Portainer is primarily focused on managing Docker environments. It provides an intuitive interface to manage containers, volumes, networks, and other Docker-specific resources. Terraform, on the other hand, has a wider scope and can be used to manage resources on multiple cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. It allows users to define and manage infrastructure resources across different platforms.
Granularity of Control: With Portainer, users have more granular control over individual containers and Docker resources. They can easily create, start, stop, and monitor containers without the need to write code. Terraform, on the other hand, provides a higher level of abstraction and allows users to define infrastructure resources and their dependencies in a code-based configuration file. This allows for more flexible and repeatable deployments, but also requires a higher level of technical proficiency.
State Management: Portainer does not maintain a state of the deployed infrastructure. Each action performed within the Portainer interface directly affects the running containers and resources. On the other hand, Terraform maintains a state file that keeps track of the current state of the infrastructure. This allows Terraform to determine the desired state and make only the necessary changes to achieve that state. It provides benefits like idempotency and the ability to plan and apply changes without disrupting the running infrastructure.
Community and Ecosystem: Portainer has a large and active community that contributes to the development and improvement of the tool. It provides extensive documentation, support forums, and plugins to enhance its functionality. Terraform, on the other hand, has a massive ecosystem with a strong community backing it. It has an extensive provider ecosystem that allows users to manage resources on different cloud providers, as well as many modules and templates available for common use cases.
Complexity and Learning Curve: Due to its user-friendly interface, Portainer is relatively easier to get started with and requires minimal technical knowledge. It is ideal for users who are new to Docker or who prefer a visual interface for managing their containers. Terraform, on the other hand, has a steeper learning curve as it requires understanding and writing code-based configuration files. It is more suitable for users who have a solid understanding of infrastructure management and are looking for a powerful, flexible, and efficient way to provision and manage infrastructure resources.
In summary, Portainer provides a user-friendly interface for managing Docker environments, while Terraform is an infrastructure as code tool that allows for the provisioning and management of infrastructure resources in a flexible and repeatable manner across multiple cloud providers.
Ok, so first - AWS Copilot is CloudFormation under the hood, but the way it works results in you not thinking about CFN anymore. AWS found the right balance with Copilot - it's insanely simple to setup production-ready multi-account environment with many services inside, with CI/CD out of the box etc etc. It's pretty new, but even now it was enough to launch Transcripto, which uses may be a dozen of different AWS services, all bound together by Copilot.
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 Portainer
- Simple36
- Great UI27
- Friendly19
- Easy to setup, gives a practical interface for Docker12
- Fully featured11
- Because it just works, super simple yet powerful11
- A must for Docker DevOps9
- Free and opensource7
- It's simple, fast and the support is great5
- API5
- Template Support4
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
Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions
Cons of Portainer
Cons of Terraform
- Doesn't have full support to GKE1
Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions
What is Portainer?
What is Terraform?
Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!
What companies use Portainer?
What companies use Terraform?
Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions
What tools integrate with Portainer?
What tools integrate with Terraform?
Sign up to get full access to all the tool integrationsMake informed product decisions
Blog Posts
+23
+13
+22+42