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Rundeck vs Terraform: What are the differences?
# Introduction
1. **Integration**:
Rundeck is primarily used for orchestrating workflows across different systems, whereas Terraform focuses on infrastructure as code, allowing users to define and provision infrastructure in a declarative manner.
2. **Syntax**:
Rundeck uses a YAML or XML-based syntax to define job workflows, while Terraform uses HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) to define infrastructure resources and their dependencies, making it more user-friendly for defining and managing infrastructure.
3. **Scope**:
Rundeck is more focused on task orchestration and automation, offering features such as job scheduling, remote execution, and logging, while Terraform focuses on provisioning and managing infrastructure resources, such as virtual machines, containers, networks, and services.
4. **Plugins**:
Rundeck provides a wide range of plugins for integrating with various tools and services, making it highly extensible in terms of functionality, whereas Terraform has a smaller but growing number of providers and modules for integrating with different cloud providers and services.
5. **State Management**:
Terraform maintains a state file that keeps track of the resources it manages, allowing for efficient updates and resource tracking, while Rundeck does not have a built-in state management system, making it more suitable for ad-hoc task execution and automation.
6. **Community Support**:
Terraform has a larger and more active community compared to Rundeck, offering extensive documentation, tutorials, and community-contributed modules, making it easier for users to get started and troubleshoot issues.
In Summary, Rundeck is a tool for orchestrating workflows and task automation, while Terraform is designed for infrastructure provisioning and management using declarative code.
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 Rundeck
- Role based access control3
- Easy to understand3
- Doesn't need containers1
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
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Cons of Rundeck
Cons of Terraform
- Doesn't have full support to GKE1
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What is Rundeck?
What is Terraform?
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