Terraform vs Travis CI: What are the differences?
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; Travis CI: A hosted continuous integration service for open source and private projects. Free for open source projects, our CI environment provides multiple runtimes (e.g. Node.js or PHP versions), data stores and so on. Because of this, hosting your project on travis-ci.com means you can effortlessly test your library or applications against multiple runtimes and data stores without even having all of them installed locally.
Terraform belongs to "Infrastructure Build Tools" category of the tech stack, while Travis CI can be primarily classified under "Continuous Integration".
Some of the features offered by Terraform are:
- 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.
On the other hand, Travis CI provides the following key features:
- Easy Setup- Getting started with Travis CI is as easy as enabling a project, adding basic build instructions to your project and committing code.
- Supports Your Platform- Lots of databases and services are pre-installed and can simply be enabled in your build configuration, we'll launch them for you automatically. MySQL, PostgreSQL, ElasticSearch, Redis, Riak, RabbitMQ, Memcached are available by default.
- Deploy With Confidence- Deploying to production after a successful build is as easy as setting up a bit of configuration, and we'll deploy your code to Heroku, Engine Yard Cloud, Nodejitsu, cloudControl, OpenShift, and CloudFoundry.
"Infrastructure as code" is the primary reason why developers consider Terraform over the competitors, whereas "Github integration" was stated as the key factor in picking Travis CI.
Terraform is an open source tool with 17.4K GitHub stars and 4.77K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Terraform's open source repository on GitHub.
According to the StackShare community, Travis CI has a broader approval, being mentioned in 666 company stacks & 613 developers stacks; compared to Terraform, which is listed in 490 company stacks and 298 developer stacks.
