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Cloud Foundry vs Terraform: What are the differences?
Introduction
In this article, we will discuss the key differences between Cloud Foundry and Terraform.
Deployment Platform: Cloud Foundry is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solution that provides a ready-to-use runtime environment for applications. It abstracts away the underlying infrastructure and provides a way to easily deploy, manage, and scale applications. On the other hand, Terraform is an infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tool that allows users to define and manage their infrastructure as code, making it more flexible and agnostic to any cloud provider or infrastructure platform.
Abstraction Level: Cloud Foundry focuses on the application layer, abstracting away the underlying infrastructure details. It provides developers with a high-level interface to deploy and manage applications without worrying about the infrastructure setup. Terraform, on the other hand, operates at the infrastructure layer, providing a way to provision and manage infrastructure resources like virtual machines, storage, networking, etc., across different cloud providers.
Platform Flexibility: Cloud Foundry is a specific platform that offers a predefined runtime environment, buildpacks, and services. It has its own ecosystem, and applications need to be developed and designed to run on Cloud Foundry. In contrast, Terraform is highly flexible and vendor-agnostic. It can be used to provision and manage resources across multiple cloud providers and infrastructure platforms without being tied to any specific platform or runtime environment.
Infrastructure Orchestration vs Application Orchestration: Terraform is primarily an infrastructure orchestration tool. It focuses on provisioning and managing the infrastructure components required by an application to run. It defines and manages the infrastructure's desired state, making it possible to manage updates and changes over time. Cloud Foundry, on the other hand, is an application orchestrator. It focuses on deploying, scaling, and managing applications, but it does not directly manage the underlying infrastructure.
Deployment Flexibility: With Terraform, deployments are more granular and customizable. Users can define and manage individual infrastructure components, making it possible to create complex and customized infrastructure setups. In Cloud Foundry, deployments are higher-level and follow the platform's predefined structure. It provides a simplified deployment model, suitable for quickly deploying and managing applications without complex infrastructure configurations.
Community and Ecosystem: Cloud Foundry has an established community and ecosystem. It provides a wide range of buildpacks, services, and tools that integrate well with the platform, making it easier to develop, deploy, and manage applications. Terraform, on the other hand, has a growing and active community but offers a more generic and flexible approach. It benefits from the wider infrastructure-as-code ecosystem and integrations with different providers.
In summary, Cloud Foundry is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solution that focuses on the application layer, providing a simplified deployment model and an ecosystem of buildpacks and services. Terraform, on the other hand, is an infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tool that operates at the infrastructure layer, providing a flexible and vendor-agnostic approach to provision and manage infrastructure resources.
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 Cloud Foundry
- Perfectly aligned with springboot2
- Free distributed tracing (zipkin)1
- Application health management1
- Free service discovery (Eureka)1
Pros of Terraform
- Infrastructure as code121
- 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 Cloud Foundry
Cons of Terraform
- Doesn't have full support to GKE1
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What is Cloud Foundry?
What is Terraform?
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