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Chef vs Terraform: What are the differences?

Introduction: Chef and Terraform are both popular configuration management tools used in the DevOps ecosystem. However, they have key differences that set them apart in terms of their approach and functionality.

  1. Language and Configuration: Chef primarily uses Ruby as its configuration language, allowing users to write recipes and cookbooks in Ruby syntax. On the other hand, Terraform uses HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) or JSON for its configuration files. This difference in languages can impact the comfort level and ease of use for developers.

  2. Granularity: Chef operates at a more granular level, allowing users to define configurations at the resource level, specifying the desired state for each resource. This enables fine-grained control over configurations and is well-suited for managing complex infrastructure. In contrast, Terraform operates at a higher level of abstraction, treating the infrastructure as a whole and focusing on the provision and orchestration of resources.

  3. Scalability and Resource Management: Chef is primarily designed for managing server configurations and software installations on individual nodes. It excels at configuring and maintaining a large number of nodes in a scalable manner. In contrast, Terraform specializes in managing infrastructure as code and provisioning resources from cloud providers or infrastructure providers. It is especially suitable for managing cloud resources and supports multiple providers.

  4. Human Readability: Chef recipes and cookbooks are generally more human-readable due to the use of Ruby as the configuration language. This makes it easier for developers and operators to understand, modify, and collaborate on configurations. On the other hand, Terraform's HCL configuration files may be less familiar to some developers, especially those who are not familiar with HashiCorp tools, but its syntax is relatively easy to learn for most users.

  5. Procedural vs. Declarative: Chef follows a procedural approach where a series of ordered steps are executed to converge the current state of a system with the desired state. It relies on idempotent resource declarations and imperative logic. In contrast, Terraform follows a declarative approach, allowing users to describe the desired state of the infrastructure, and Terraform itself handles the provisioning and orchestration to achieve that state. This declarative nature simplifies infrastructure management and reduces the risk of configuration drift.

  6. Community and Ecosystem: Both Chef and Terraform have active communities and ecosystems. However, Chef has been around for a longer time and has a more mature community and a vast number of pre-built cookbooks and resources available. Terraform, being a part of the larger HashiCorp ecosystem, benefits from its integration with other tools like Vault and Consul.

In Summary, Chef and Terraform differ in their configuration languages, granularity of control, scalability, human readability, approach (procedural vs. declarative), and community/ecosystem support. These differences make them suited for different use cases and preferences within the DevOps community.

Advice on Chef and Terraform
Needs advice
on
AnsibleAnsibleChefChef
and
Puppet LabsPuppet Labs

I'm just getting started using Vagrant to help automate setting up local VMs to set up a Kubernetes cluster (development and experimentation only). (Yes, I do know about minikube)

I'm looking for a tool to help install software packages, setup users, etc..., on these VMs. I'm also fairly new to Ansible, Chef, and Puppet. What's a good one to start with to learn? I might decide to try all 3 at some point for my own curiosity.

The most important factors for me are simplicity, ease of use, shortest learning curve.

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Replies (2)
Recommends
on
AnsibleAnsible

I have been working with Puppet and Ansible. The reason why I prefer ansible is the distribution of it. Ansible is more lightweight and therefore more popular. This leads to situations, where you can get fully packaged applications for ansible (e.g. confluent) supported by the vendor, but only incomplete packages for Puppet.

The only advantage I would see with Puppet if someone wants to use Foreman. This is still better supported with Puppet.

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Gabriel Pa
Recommends
on
KubernetesKubernetes
at

If you are just starting out, might as well learn Kubernetes There's a lot of tools that come with Kube that make it easier to use and most importantly: you become cloud-agnostic. We use Ansible because it's a lot simpler than Chef or Puppet and if you use Docker Compose for your deployments you can re-use them with Kubernetes later when you migrate

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Decisions about Chef and Terraform
Kirill Shirinkin
Cloud and DevOps Consultant at mkdev · | 3 upvotes · 149.5K views

Ok, so first - AWS Copilot is CloudFormation under the hood, but the way it works results in you not thinking about CFN anymore. AWS found the right balance with Copilot - it's insanely simple to setup production-ready multi-account environment with many services inside, with CI/CD out of the box etc etc. It's pretty new, but even now it was enough to launch Transcripto, which uses may be a dozen of different AWS services, all bound together by Copilot.

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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.

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Sergey Ivanov
Overview

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.

Advantages

Terraform 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.

Disadvantages

Software 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.

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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.
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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

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Pros of Chef
Pros of Terraform
  • 110
    Dynamic and idempotent server configuration
  • 76
    Reusable components
  • 47
    Integration testing with Vagrant
  • 43
    Repeatable
  • 30
    Mock testing with Chefspec
  • 14
    Ruby
  • 8
    Can package cookbooks to guarantee repeatability
  • 7
    Works with AWS
  • 3
    Has marketplace where you get readymade cookbooks
  • 3
    Matured product with good community support
  • 2
    Less declarative more procedural
  • 2
    Open source configuration mgmt made easy(ish)
  • 121
    Infrastructure as code
  • 73
    Declarative syntax
  • 45
    Planning
  • 28
    Simple
  • 24
    Parallelism
  • 8
    Well-documented
  • 8
    Cloud agnostic
  • 6
    It's like coding your infrastructure in simple English
  • 6
    Immutable infrastructure
  • 5
    Platform agnostic
  • 4
    Extendable
  • 4
    Automation
  • 4
    Automates infrastructure deployments
  • 4
    Portability
  • 2
    Lightweight
  • 2
    Scales to hundreds of hosts

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Cons of Chef
Cons of Terraform
    Be the first to leave a con
    • 1
      Doesn't have full support to GKE

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    - No public GitHub repository available -

    What is Chef?

    Chef enables you to manage and scale cloud infrastructure with no downtime or interruptions. Freely move applications and configurations from one cloud to another. Chef is integrated with all major cloud providers including Amazon EC2, VMWare, IBM Smartcloud, Rackspace, OpenStack, Windows Azure, HP Cloud, Google Compute Engine, Joyent Cloud and others.

    What is Terraform?

    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.

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    What companies use Chef?
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    What are some alternatives to Chef and Terraform?
    Ansible
    Ansible is an IT automation tool. It can configure systems, deploy software, and orchestrate more advanced IT tasks such as continuous deployments or zero downtime rolling updates. Ansible’s goals are foremost those of simplicity and maximum ease of use.
    Puppet Labs
    Puppet is an automated administrative engine for your Linux, Unix, and Windows systems and performs administrative tasks (such as adding users, installing packages, and updating server configurations) based on a centralized specification.
    Jenkins
    In a nutshell Jenkins CI is the leading open-source continuous integration server. Built with Java, it provides over 300 plugins to support building and testing virtually any project.
    Git
    Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.
    GitHub
    GitHub is the best place to share code with friends, co-workers, classmates, and complete strangers. Over three million people use GitHub to build amazing things together.
    See all alternatives