Terraform vs VisualOps: What are the differences?
What is 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.
What is VisualOps? Visual DevOps Automation for Amazon Web Services. VisualOps has a WYSIWYG editor to design, configure and provision your AWS cloud applications. Once the applications are deployed, VisualOps continuously monitors and manages the apps to ensure they always run in the defined states.
Terraform and VisualOps are primarily classified as "Infrastructure Build" and "Server Configuration and Automation" tools respectively.
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, VisualOps provides the following key features:
- drag-n-drop components to build your AWS infrastructure
- clicks instances to setup the software configuration (package, file, code, etc.)
- single click to deploy, within minutes the app is ready to use!
Terraform is an open source tool with 17.7K GitHub stars and 4.83K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Terraform's open source repository on GitHub.
