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Terraform vs Vagrant: What are the differences?
Terraform and Vagrant are both tools used in the realm of infrastructure provisioning and management. Terraform focuses on infrastructure as code and automating the creation of resources, while Vagrant simplifies development environments setup. Here are the key differences between Terraform and Vagrant:
Infrastructure Provisioning vs. Development Environments: Terraform is primarily used for provisioning and managing infrastructure resources in cloud environments. It helps define and automate the creation of resources like virtual machines, networks, and storage. Vagrant, on the other hand, is specifically designed to create and manage development environments, allowing developers to quickly set up local virtual machines for testing and development purposes.
Infrastructure as Code vs. Development Environment Configuration: Terraform follows the infrastructure as code (IAC) approach, enabling users to define infrastructure resources using a declarative language. Vagrant focuses on configuring development environments using scripts and configuration files, providing a standardized setup for development teams.
Cloud-Agnostic vs. Virtualization: Terraform supports multiple cloud providers and can be used to provision resources in various cloud platforms. Vagrant is more focused on virtualization, creating local development environments using tools like VirtualBox or Docker.
Resource Creation vs. Environment Replication: Terraform's main goal is to create and manage infrastructure resources like servers, databases, and networking components. Vagrant's primary purpose is to replicate development environments, ensuring consistency across team members and improving collaboration.
Use Case and Audience: Terraform is suitable for DevOps and infrastructure teams that need to manage and automate cloud resources at scale. Vagrant targets developers who want to create reproducible development environments quickly and efficiently.
Workflow Integration: Terraform is often integrated into continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines to ensure consistent infrastructure changes. Vagrant's integration is more focused on providing a consistent development environment across team members' local machines.
In summary, Terraform is centered around provisioning and managing infrastructure resources in cloud environments using an infrastructure as code approach, while Vagrant simplifies the setup of consistent development environments for individual developers using virtualization technology.
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 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
Pros of Vagrant
- Development environments352
- Simple bootstraping290
- Free237
- Boxes139
- Provisioning130
- Portable84
- Synced folders81
- Reproducible69
- Ssh51
- Very flexible44
- Works well, can be replicated easily with other devs5
- Easy-to-share, easy-to-version dev configuration5
- Great3
- Just works3
- Quick way to get running2
- DRY - "Do Not Repeat Yourself"1
- Container Friendly1
- What is vagrant?1
- Good documentation1
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Cons of Terraform
- Doesn't have full support to GKE1
Cons of Vagrant
- Can become v complex w prod. provisioner (Salt, etc.)2
- Multiple VMs quickly eat up disk space2
- Development environment that kills your battery1
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