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Beanstalk vs Terraform: What are the differences?
Key Differences between Beanstalk and Terraform
Beanstalk and Terraform are both popular tools used in software development and deployment, but they have some key differences. Below are six of the main differences between Beanstalk and Terraform:
Purpose and Functionality: Beanstalk is a fully-managed service provided by AWS that helps in deploying and scaling applications, while Terraform is an infrastructure provisioning tool that allows users to define and provision infrastructure resources across various cloud providers. Beanstalk is more focused on application deployment, while Terraform is more focused on infrastructure management.
Configuration Language: Beanstalk uses AWS-specific configuration files written in YAML or JSON format for specifying the application settings and environment details. On the other hand, Terraform uses its own configuration language called HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL), which provides a more expressive and flexible syntax for defining infrastructure resources.
Infrastructure as Code vs. Platform as a Service: Terraform follows the Infrastructure as Code (IaC) approach, where infrastructure resources are defined as code and can be version controlled. It allows for more granular control and customization of infrastructure resources. Beanstalk, on the other hand, is more of a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering, where the underlying infrastructure is abstracted away, and users only need to focus on deploying their applications without worrying about the underlying infrastructure details.
Vendor Lock-In: Beanstalk is tightly integrated with AWS services and is specifically designed for use within the AWS ecosystem. This can result in vendor lock-in, where users may have difficulties migrating their applications to other cloud providers. Terraform, on the other hand, is provider-agnostic and supports multiple cloud providers, allowing users to define infrastructure resources in a portable and modular way.
Granularity and Flexibility: Beanstalk provides a higher level of abstraction and automation, making it easier to use but with less flexibility and control over infrastructure resources. Terraform, on the other hand, allows for more fine-grained control and customization of infrastructure resources. Users can define and manage complex infrastructure setups and configurations using Terraform's extensive provider ecosystem and flexible configuration language.
Community and Ecosystem: Beanstalk is a product of AWS and has a large user base and community support. It provides a user-friendly interface and integrates well with other AWS services. Terraform, on the other hand, is an open-source tool maintained by HashiCorp and has a growing community and ecosystem. It supports a wide range of cloud providers and has a rich set of community-contributed provider plugins and modules.
In summary, Beanstalk is a fully-managed service focused on application deployment in the AWS ecosystem, while Terraform is an open-source infrastructure provisioning tool that allows for more flexible and granular control over infrastructure resources across multiple cloud providers.
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 Beanstalk
- Ftp deploy14
- Deployment9
- Easy to navigate8
- Code Editing4
- HipChat Integration4
- Integrations4
- Code review3
- HTML Preview2
- Security1
- Blame Tool1
- Cohesion1
Pros of Terraform
- Infrastructure as code122
- 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
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Cons of Beanstalk
Cons of Terraform
- Doesn't have full support to GKE1
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