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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Continuous Deployment
  4. Server Configuration And Automation
  5. DC/OS vs Terraform

DC/OS vs Terraform

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Terraform
Terraform
Stacks22.9K
Followers14.7K
Votes344
GitHub Stars47.0K
Forks10.1K
DC/OS
DC/OS
Stacks109
Followers180
Votes12
GitHub Stars2.4K
Forks488

DC/OS vs Terraform: What are the differences?

Considering the differences between DC/OS and Terraform:

  1. Architecture: DC/OS is designed as an operating system for data centers and cloud environments, focusing on managing and scaling applications. On the other hand, Terraform is an infrastructure as code tool used for provisioning and managing infrastructure resources in a cloud environment.

  2. Scope: DC/OS primarily focuses on container orchestration and application management, providing features like scheduling, scaling, and monitoring. In contrast, Terraform provides a broader scope by enabling the management of various infrastructure components such as compute instances, storage, and networking.

  3. Abstraction Level: DC/OS operates at a higher level of abstraction, allowing users to focus more on application deployment and management tasks without worrying about underlying infrastructure details. Terraform, however, requires users to define the configuration of each infrastructure component explicitly, providing a more granular level of control.

  4. Vendor Support: DC/OS is developed and maintained by D2iQ, formerly known as Mesosphere, offering enterprise support for the platform. Terraform, on the other hand, is an open-source tool maintained by HashiCorp, with support available through community forums and enterprise offerings.

  5. Language: DC/OS configuration primarily involves using JSON or YAML files to define tasks, services, and other cluster resources. In contrast, Terraform uses HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) to define infrastructure resources, making it more readable and expressive for managing complex configurations.

  6. State Management: DC/OS manages state internally within its cluster state, ensuring consistent application deployment and scaling. Terraform, however, utilizes a state file locally or remotely to track the current state of managed infrastructure resources, allowing for collaboration and versioning.

In Summary, DC/OS and Terraform differ in their architecture focus, scope, abstraction level, vendor support, configuration language, and state management approach.

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Advice on Terraform, DC/OS

Sung Won
Sung Won

Nov 4, 2019

DecidedonGoogle Cloud IoT CoreGoogle Cloud IoT CoreTerraformTerraformPythonPython

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

2.25M views2.25M
Comments
Timothy
Timothy

SRE

Mar 20, 2020

Decided

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.
385k views385k
Comments
Daniel
Daniel

May 4, 2020

Decided

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.

426k views426k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Terraform
Terraform
DC/OS
DC/OS

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.

Unlike traditional operating systems, DC/OS spans multiple machines within a network, aggregating their resources to maximize utilization by distributed applications.

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.;Change Automation: Complex changesets can be applied to your infrastructure with minimal human interaction. With the previously mentioned execution plan and resource graph, you know exactly what Terraform will change and in what order, avoiding many possible human errors
High Resource Utilization;Mixed Workload Colocation;Container Orchestration;Resource Isolation;Stateful Storage;Package Repositories;Public Cloud;Private Cloud;On-Premise;Command Line Interface;Web Interface;Elastic Scalability;High Availability;Zero Downtime Upgrades;Service Discovery;Load Balancing;Production-Ready
Statistics
GitHub Stars
47.0K
GitHub Stars
2.4K
GitHub Forks
10.1K
GitHub Forks
488
Stacks
22.9K
Stacks
109
Followers
14.7K
Followers
180
Votes
344
Votes
12
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 121
    Infrastructure as code
  • 73
    Declarative syntax
  • 45
    Planning
  • 28
    Simple
  • 24
    Parallelism
Cons
  • 1
    Doesn't have full support to GKE
Pros
  • 5
    Easy to setup a HA cluster
  • 3
    Open source
  • 2
    Has templates to install via AWS and Azure
  • 1
    Easy Setup
  • 1
    Easy to get services running and operate them
Integrations
Heroku
Heroku
Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2
CloudFlare
CloudFlare
DNSimple
DNSimple
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure
Consul
Consul
Equinix Metal
Equinix Metal
DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean
OpenStack
OpenStack
Google Compute Engine
Google Compute Engine
Apache Mesos
Apache Mesos

What are some alternatives to Terraform, DC/OS?

Ansible

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.

Chef

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.

Capistrano

Capistrano

Capistrano is a remote server automation tool. It supports the scripting and execution of arbitrary tasks, and includes a set of sane-default deployment workflows.

Puppet Labs

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.

Salt

Salt

Salt is a new approach to infrastructure management. Easy enough to get running in minutes, scalable enough to manage tens of thousands of servers, and fast enough to communicate with them in seconds. Salt delivers a dynamic communication bus for infrastructures that can be used for orchestration, remote execution, configuration management and much more.

Fabric

Fabric

Fabric is a Python (2.5-2.7) library and command-line tool for streamlining the use of SSH for application deployment or systems administration tasks. It provides a basic suite of operations for executing local or remote shell commands (normally or via sudo) and uploading/downloading files, as well as auxiliary functionality such as prompting the running user for input, or aborting execution.

AWS OpsWorks

AWS OpsWorks

Start from templates for common technologies like Ruby, Node.JS, PHP, and Java, or build your own using Chef recipes to install software packages and perform any task that you can script. AWS OpsWorks can scale your application using automatic load-based or time-based scaling and maintain the health of your application by detecting failed instances and replacing them. You have full control of deployments and automation of each component

Nomad

Nomad

Nomad is a cluster manager, designed for both long lived services and short lived batch processing workloads. Developers use a declarative job specification to submit work, and Nomad ensures constraints are satisfied and resource utilization is optimized by efficient task packing. Nomad supports all major operating systems and virtualized, containerized, or standalone applications.

Apache Mesos

Apache Mesos

Apache Mesos is a cluster manager that simplifies the complexity of running applications on a shared pool of servers.

cPanel

cPanel

It is an industry leading hosting platform with world-class support. It is globally empowering hosting providers through fully-automated point-and-click hosting platform by hosting-centric professionals

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