Terraform vs Buildroot: What are the differences?
Developers describe Terraform as "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. On the other hand, Buildroot is detailed as "Making Embedded Linux Easy". It is a tool that simplifies and automates the process of building a complete Linux system for an embedded system, using cross-compilation.
Terraform and Buildroot belong to "Infrastructure Build Tools" category of the tech stack.
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, Buildroot provides the following key features:
- Embedded system
- Embedded Linux
- Cross-compilation
Terraform and Buildroot are both open source tools. Terraform with 21.7K GitHub stars and 5.64K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Buildroot with 1.02K GitHub stars and 1.07K GitHub forks.
