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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Continuous Deployment
  4. Server Configuration And Automation
  5. Terraform vs Traefik

Terraform vs Traefik

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Terraform
Terraform
Stacks22.9K
Followers14.7K
Votes344
GitHub Stars47.0K
Forks10.1K
Traefik
Traefik
Stacks965
Followers1.2K
Votes93

Terraform vs Traefik: What are the differences?

  1. Configuration Management vs. Reverse Proxy: Terraform is primarily a configuration management tool used for infrastructure as code, whereas Traefik is a reverse proxy and load balancer designed to manage incoming network traffic.
  2. Scope of Use: Terraform is used to provision and manage various cloud resources, infrastructure components, and services across different cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. On the other hand, Traefik is specifically focused on routing and load balancing HTTP and TCP traffic within a microservices architecture.
  3. Language and Syntax: Terraform uses its own declarative configuration language called HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) or JSON for defining infrastructure, while Traefik is configured using YAML or TOML files.
  4. Scaling and High Availability: Terraform can be used to create scalable and highly available infrastructure setups by defining multiple instances of resources, whereas Traefik excels in automatically scaling to handle increased traffic and ensuring high availability by distributing requests efficiently.
  5. Ease of Integration: Terraform integrates seamlessly with various DevOps tools and cloud platforms, enabling automation of infrastructure deployments, while Traefik provides native support for Docker, Kubernetes, and other container orchestration platforms for routing traffic to microservices.
  6. Monitoring and Metrics: Terraform does not provide built-in monitoring capabilities, but Traefik offers metrics and monitoring functionalities to track the performance and health of the traffic routing mechanism.

In Summary, Terraform focuses on infrastructure provisioning and management across different cloud providers, while Traefik specializes in routing and load balancing HTTP and TCP traffic within a microservices architecture.

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Advice on Terraform, Traefik

Sung Won
Sung Won

Nov 4, 2019

DecidedonGoogle Cloud IoT CoreGoogle Cloud IoT CoreTerraformTerraformPythonPython

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

2.25M views2.25M
Comments
Timothy
Timothy

SRE

Mar 20, 2020

Decided

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.
385k views385k
Comments
Daniel
Daniel

May 4, 2020

Decided

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.

426k views426k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Terraform
Terraform
Traefik
Traefik

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.

A modern HTTP reverse proxy and load balancer that makes deploying microservices easy. Traefik integrates with your existing infrastructure components and configures itself automatically and dynamically.

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.;Change Automation: Complex changesets can be applied to your infrastructure with minimal human interaction. With the previously mentioned execution plan and resource graph, you know exactly what Terraform will change and in what order, avoiding many possible human errors
Continuously updates its configuration (No restarts!); Supports multiple load balancing algorithms; Provides HTTPS to your microservices by leveraging Let's Encrypt (wildcard certificates support); Circuit breakers, retry; High Availability with cluster mode; See the magic through its clean web UI; Websocket, HTTP/2, GRPC ready; Provides metrics; Keeps access logs; Fast; Exposes a Rest API
Statistics
GitHub Stars
47.0K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
10.1K
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
22.9K
Stacks
965
Followers
14.7K
Followers
1.2K
Votes
344
Votes
93
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 121
    Infrastructure as code
  • 73
    Declarative syntax
  • 45
    Planning
  • 28
    Simple
  • 24
    Parallelism
Cons
  • 1
    Doesn't have full support to GKE
Pros
  • 20
    Kubernetes integration
  • 18
    Watch service discovery updates
  • 14
    Letsencrypt support
  • 13
    Swarm integration
  • 12
    Several backends
Cons
  • 7
    Complicated setup
  • 7
    Not very performant (fast)
Integrations
Heroku
Heroku
Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2
CloudFlare
CloudFlare
DNSimple
DNSimple
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure
Consul
Consul
Equinix Metal
Equinix Metal
DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean
OpenStack
OpenStack
Google Compute Engine
Google Compute Engine
Marathon
Marathon
InfluxDB
InfluxDB
Kubernetes
Kubernetes
Docker
Docker
gRPC
gRPC
Let's Encrypt
Let's Encrypt
Google Kubernetes Engine
Google Kubernetes Engine
Consul
Consul
StatsD
StatsD
Docker Swarm
Docker Swarm

What are some alternatives to Terraform, Traefik?

Ansible

Ansible

Ansible is an IT automation tool. It can configure systems, deploy software, and orchestrate more advanced IT tasks such as continuous deployments or zero downtime rolling updates. Ansible’s goals are foremost those of simplicity and maximum ease of use.

HAProxy

HAProxy

HAProxy (High Availability Proxy) is a free, very fast and reliable solution offering high availability, load balancing, and proxying for TCP and HTTP-based applications.

Chef

Chef

Chef enables you to manage and scale cloud infrastructure with no downtime or interruptions. Freely move applications and configurations from one cloud to another. Chef is integrated with all major cloud providers including Amazon EC2, VMWare, IBM Smartcloud, Rackspace, OpenStack, Windows Azure, HP Cloud, Google Compute Engine, Joyent Cloud and others.

Capistrano

Capistrano

Capistrano is a remote server automation tool. It supports the scripting and execution of arbitrary tasks, and includes a set of sane-default deployment workflows.

Puppet Labs

Puppet Labs

Puppet is an automated administrative engine for your Linux, Unix, and Windows systems and performs administrative tasks (such as adding users, installing packages, and updating server configurations) based on a centralized specification.

Salt

Salt

Salt is a new approach to infrastructure management. Easy enough to get running in minutes, scalable enough to manage tens of thousands of servers, and fast enough to communicate with them in seconds. Salt delivers a dynamic communication bus for infrastructures that can be used for orchestration, remote execution, configuration management and much more.

Fabric

Fabric

Fabric is a Python (2.5-2.7) library and command-line tool for streamlining the use of SSH for application deployment or systems administration tasks. It provides a basic suite of operations for executing local or remote shell commands (normally or via sudo) and uploading/downloading files, as well as auxiliary functionality such as prompting the running user for input, or aborting execution.

AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)

AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)

With Elastic Load Balancing, you can add and remove EC2 instances as your needs change without disrupting the overall flow of information. If one EC2 instance fails, Elastic Load Balancing automatically reroutes the traffic to the remaining running EC2 instances. If the failed EC2 instance is restored, Elastic Load Balancing restores the traffic to that instance. Elastic Load Balancing offers clients a single point of contact, and it can also serve as the first line of defense against attacks on your network. You can offload the work of encryption and decryption to Elastic Load Balancing, so your servers can focus on their main task.

AWS OpsWorks

AWS OpsWorks

Start from templates for common technologies like Ruby, Node.JS, PHP, and Java, or build your own using Chef recipes to install software packages and perform any task that you can script. AWS OpsWorks can scale your application using automatic load-based or time-based scaling and maintain the health of your application by detecting failed instances and replacing them. You have full control of deployments and automation of each component

Fly

Fly

Deploy apps through our global load balancer with minimal shenanigans. All Fly-enabled applications get free SSL certificates, accept traffic through our global network of datacenters, and encrypt all traffic from visitors through to application servers.

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