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Helm vs Terraform: What are the differences?
Helm and Terraform are both widely used tools in the DevOps and infrastructure management space. Let's explore the key differences between them.
Architecture: Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes, while Terraform is an infrastructure provisioning tool. Helm focuses on deploying and managing applications on a Kubernetes cluster, while Terraform is designed to create and manage infrastructure resources across different cloud providers.
Abstraction Level: Helm operates at a higher level of abstraction compared to Terraform. Helm packages applications as charts, which include all the necessary Kubernetes manifests and configurations. These packaged charts provide a declarative approach to application deployment, allowing users to focus on the application logic rather than the infrastructure details. On the other hand, Terraform works at a lower level, allowing users to define and manage individual infrastructure resources in a more granular manner.
Deployment and Configuration: Helm simplifies the deployment and configuration of applications on Kubernetes by providing a templating engine that allows for parameterized values and extensive customization. It also supports rollbacks and versioning of releases, making it easier to manage application updates. Terraform, on the other hand, follows an immutable infrastructure approach, where infrastructure resources are defined in code and changes are applied by creating new resources and destroying the old ones.
Ecosystem and Community: Helm has a mature and active community, with a large number of charts available in the Helm Chart repository. This repository provides pre-configured packages for various applications and services, making it easy to deploy complex applications on Kubernetes. Terraform also has a strong community support and a rich ecosystem, with a wide range of providers and modules available for different cloud platforms and infrastructure components.
Scope and Flexibility: Helm is primarily focused on deploying and managing applications on Kubernetes, making it a suitable choice for teams working exclusively with Kubernetes-based environments. Terraform, on the other hand, offers a broader scope and can be used to manage infrastructure resources across multiple cloud providers and services. This makes Terraform a more flexible tool for managing heterogeneous infrastructure environments.
Versioning and Configuration Management: Helm provides built-in versioning and release management capabilities, allowing users to easily deploy, upgrade, and rollback application releases. It also supports the management of configuration values through configurable Helm values files or via command-line arguments. Terraform, on the other hand, relies on external tools or custom workflows for versioning and configuration management, as it primarily focuses on managing infrastructure resources rather than application releases.
In summary, Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes, simplifying the deployment and management of applications on Kubernetes clusters, while Terraform is an infrastructure as code (IaC) tool that enables the provisioning and management of cloud infrastructure across various providers.
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 Helm
- Infrastructure as code8
- Open source6
- Easy setup2
- Support1
- Testability and reproducibility1
Pros of Terraform
- Infrastructure as code122
- 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 Helm
Cons of Terraform
- Doesn't have full support to GKE1
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