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- Create Date March 28, 2023
- Last Updated March 28, 2023
What is Terraform; Infrastructure Orchestration tools vs Configuration Management tools:
- Terraform and CloudFormation are examples of Infrastructure as Code (IAC); they allow you to orchestrate the infrastructure and provision the servers by themselves.
- This is different from Configuration Management tools like Ansible, Chef and Puppet which are designed to install and manage software on existing servers that have their infrastructure provisioned already; they may be able to do some infrastructure provisioning but not as well as dedicated tools like Terraform.
- These can be integrated with IAC (not always but Terraform does allow this natively) where the IAC provisions the infrastructure and the configuration tool installs and configures the application for the resources, like so:
Choosing the IAC tool for an organization is done by answering the following questions:
- Is the infrastructure going to be vendor specific in the longer term E.g., if they will only use AWS, then it may be better to use CloudFormation
- Will multi-cloud/hybrid-cloud based infrastructure be used? E.g., if using both Azure and AWS, then consider a different IAC
- How well does the IAC integrate with configuration management tools?
- What is the price and support like?
Advantages of Terraform:
- Support multiple platforms & has hundreds of providers
- Simple configuration language with fast learning curves
- Easy integration with configuration management tools like Ansible
- Easily extensible with plugins
- Free