Scalr vs Terraform: What are the differences?
Scalr: Scalr is cloud management software for public & private infrastructure. Scalr is not an infrastructure provider or reseller. The infrastructure you deploy on is yours: you give us the keys to your infrastructure cloud so we can make the API calls to the provider on your behalf and so we can also rev up or power down servers for you. When traffic piles up, Scalr detects the increased load, commissions new servers for you from the cloud, and then spreads the load. When using Scalr ConfigTemplates, you can easily make configuration changes for services such as MySQL and Apache. Scalr does the heavy work, pushing those changes out to your servers; Terraform: 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.
Scalr and Terraform are primarily classified as "Cloud Management" and "Infrastructure Build" tools respectively.
Some of the features offered by Scalr are:
- MySQL replication
- Scalable app servers
- Scalable database
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.
Terraform is an open source tool with 17.7K GitHub stars and 4.83K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Terraform's open source repository on GitHub.
