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Terraform vs Vault: What are the differences?
Introduction:
Terraform and Vault are two popular tools developed by HashiCorp that serve different purposes in the realm of infrastructure and security. While both tools play important roles in managing and securing IT environments, there are several key differences between Terraform and Vault.
Infrastructure Automation vs. Secret Management: The primary difference between Terraform and Vault lies in their primary purposes. Terraform is an infrastructure automation tool used for provisioning and managing infrastructure resources, while Vault is a secret management tool designed to securely store and distribute sensitive information such as passwords, API keys, and certificates.
Declarative vs. Imperative Configuration: Another key difference is in the way configuration is handled. Terraform, being an infrastructure automation tool, relies on a declarative approach for defining the desired state of infrastructure resources. It allows users to describe the desired state and Terraform handles the execution. On the other hand, Vault requires an imperative approach for its configuration, where users interact and execute commands to manage secrets.
State Management: Terraform relies on a state file to keep track of infrastructure resources and their current state. This state file, usually stored locally or remotely, keeps track of all the resources created by Terraform and helps in updating or destroying them. In contrast, Vault utilizes its own storage backend to persist secrets securely, such as a database or filesystem backend.
Integration with external systems: Terraform is designed to integrate with a variety of external systems, such as cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP, as well as other infrastructure tools like Ansible and Docker. It provides a wide range of providers and modules to interact with different systems, making it highly adaptable. On the other hand, Vault focuses on integrating with applications and systems to securely access and manage secrets.
Scope of Management: Terraform typically handles the full lifecycle of infrastructure resources, from provisioning to configuration management. It can perform tasks such as creating virtual machines, configuring networking, and deploying applications. In contrast, Vault focuses on managing secrets and access control, ensuring that sensitive information is stored and accessed securely.
Community and Ecosystem: Both Terraform and Vault have active communities and ecosystems. However, Terraform has a larger user base and community support due to its broader use case. This often results in more resources, modules, and community-driven enhancements for Terraform, making it easier for users to find solutions to their problems.
In summary, Terraform and Vault differ in their purpose, configuration approach, state management, integration capabilities, scope of management, and community ecosystems. Terraform is focused on infrastructure automation, while Vault specializes in secret management, making them complementary tools in managing and securing IT environments.
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 Vault
- Secure17
- Variety of Secret Backends13
- Very easy to set up and use11
- Dynamic secret generation8
- AuditLog5
- Privilege Access Management3
- Leasing and Renewal3
- Easy to integrate with2
- Open Source2
- Consol integration2
- Handles secret sprawl2
- Variety of Auth Backends2
- Multicloud1
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Cons of Terraform
- Doesn't have full support to GKE1
Cons of Vault
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