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Crossplane vs Terraform: What are the differences?
Key Differences Between Crossplane and Terraform
Crossplane and Terraform are both infrastructure as code (IaC) tools that enable the provisioning and management of cloud resources. However, there are several key differences between the two:
Language and Syntax: Terraform uses its own domain-specific language (DSL) called HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL). It is declarative and uses a configuration file format for defining infrastructure. On the other hand, Crossplane is built on Kubernetes and uses Kubernetes YAML to define the desired state of infrastructure resources.
Architecture: Terraform is a standalone tool that runs outside of the cloud orchestration platform. It uses its own state file to manage the infrastructure state. In contrast, Crossplane is designed as a native extension to Kubernetes and leverages the Kubernetes control plane for resource management. It stores the desired state directly as Kubernetes resources.
Multi-Cloud and Multi-Cluster Support: Terraform is renowned for its multi-cloud support, allowing users to manage resources across various cloud providers. It can also manage resources within a single cloud provider across different regions. While Crossplane also supports multiple cloud providers, it goes beyond that by providing multi-cluster support, enabling the provisioning and management of resources across multiple Kubernetes clusters.
Configuration Complexity: Terraform's HCL configuration files can become complex and challenging to manage as the infrastructure grows larger. In contrast, Crossplane leverages the power of Kubernetes and benefits from its resource management capabilities, making it easier to manage and extend configurations using Kubernetes YAML.
Custom Resources and Controllers: One of the key differentiators of Crossplane is its support for custom resources and controllers. It enables users to define their own resource types and associated controllers to automate infrastructure provisioning and management. Terraform, on the other hand, does not provide native support for custom resources.
Integration with Ecosystem: Terraform has a vast ecosystem with extensive support for various providers, modules, and plugins. It also has a large community and marketplace for sharing reusable infrastructure code. Crossplane, being built on Kubernetes, integrates seamlessly with the Kubernetes ecosystem, including support for Helm charts, Operators, and custom controllers.
In summary, Crossplane and Terraform differ in their language and syntax, architecture, multi-cloud and multi-cluster support, configuration complexity, support for custom resources and controllers, and integration with the ecosystem. Each tool has its own strengths and use cases, and the choice between them depends on the specific requirements of the infrastructure management project.
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 Crossplane
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 Crossplane
Cons of Terraform
- Doesn't have full support to GKE1
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What is Crossplane?
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