GeoEngineer vs GoFormation vs Terraform

Overview

Terraform

Stacks22.9K

Followers14.7K

Votes344

GitHub Stars47.0K

Forks10.1K

GeoEngineer

Stacks52

Followers65

Votes0

GitHub Stars401

Forks54

GoFormation

Stacks3

Followers7

Votes0

GitHub Stars849

Forks199

GeoEngineer vs GoFormation vs Terraform: What are the differences?

<GeoEngineer, GoFormation, and Terraform are infrastructure as code tools used to manage and provision cloud resources efficiently. The key differences between these tools are outlined below.>

Programming Language Support: GeoEngineer primarily uses Ruby for configuration, while GoFormation uses JSON or YAML, and Terraform supports HCL (HashiCorp Configuration Language) by default. This difference in programming language support can influence the ease of use and familiarity for users with different backgrounds.
Scope of Cloud Provider Support: Terraform has widespread support for multiple cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, while GeoEngineer focuses more on AWS-specific functionalities. GoFormation, on the other hand, provides more flexibility as it allows users to define configurations for any cloud provider.
Community and Ecosystem: Terraform has a larger established community and ecosystem with a vast number of modules and plugins available. GeoEngineer has a smaller but growing community, while GoFormation, being a newer tool, is still developing its ecosystem and gaining traction in the IaC space.
Ease of Extensibility: Terraform offers a rich plugin architecture, making it highly extensible with custom providers and modules. GeoEngineer also supports modularization and extensibility but to a lesser degree compared to Terraform. GoFormation, being lightweight and focused on simplicity, may have more limitations in terms of extensibility compared to the other tools.
Configuration File Format: GeoEngineer uses Ruby syntax for defining configurations, which can be more expressive and powerful but may require familiarity with the language. GoFormation simplifies configuration by using JSON or YAML, making it more accessible to users with varying levels of programming experience. Terraform uses its unique HCL language, which strikes a balance between readability and flexibility.

In Summary, GeoEngineer, GoFormation, and Terraform differ in their language support, cloud provider scope, community size, extensibility, and configuration file format, offering users various options based on their specific needs and preferences in managing infrastructure as code.

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CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Detailed Comparison

Terraform	GeoEngineer	GoFormation
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.	GeoEngineer uses Terraform to plan and execute changes, so the DSL to describe resources is similar to Terraform's. GeoEngineer's DSL also provides programming and object oriented features like inheritance, abstraction, branching and looping.	GoFormation is a Go library for working with AWS CloudFormation / AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) templates.
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	-	-
Statistics
GitHub Stars 47.0K	GitHub Stars 401	GitHub Stars 849
GitHub Forks 10.1K	GitHub Forks 54	GitHub Forks 199
Stacks 22.9K	Stacks 52	Stacks 3
Followers 14.7K	Followers 65	Followers 7
Votes 344	Votes 0	Votes 0
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	No community feedback yet	No community feedback yet
Integrations
Heroku Amazon EC2 CloudFlare DNSimple Microsoft Azure Consul Equinix Metal DigitalOcean OpenStack Google Compute Engine	Ruby	AWS CloudFormation Amazon EC2 Golang

What are some alternatives to Terraform, GeoEngineer, GoFormation?

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 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 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 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 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.

AWS CloudFormation

You can use AWS CloudFormation’s sample templates or create your own templates to describe the AWS resources, and any associated dependencies or runtime parameters, required to run your application. You don’t need to figure out the order in which AWS services need to be provisioned or the subtleties of how to make those dependencies work.

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

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

Packer

Packer automates the creation of any type of machine image. It embraces modern configuration management by encouraging you to use automated scripts to install and configure the software within your Packer-made images.

Scalr

Scalr is a remote state & operations backend for Terraform with access controls, policy as code, and many quality of life features.

Related Comparisons

GeoEngineer vs GoFormation vs Terraform: What are the differences?

<GeoEngineer, GoFormation, and Terraform are infrastructure as code tools used to manage and provision cloud resources efficiently. The key differences between these tools are outlined below.>

Programming Language Support: GeoEngineer primarily uses Ruby for configuration, while GoFormation uses JSON or YAML, and Terraform supports HCL (HashiCorp Configuration Language) by default. This difference in programming language support can influence the ease of use and familiarity for users with different backgrounds.
Scope of Cloud Provider Support: Terraform has widespread support for multiple cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, while GeoEngineer focuses more on AWS-specific functionalities. GoFormation, on the other hand, provides more flexibility as it allows users to define configurations for any cloud provider.
Community and Ecosystem: Terraform has a larger established community and ecosystem with a vast number of modules and plugins available. GeoEngineer has a smaller but growing community, while GoFormation, being a newer tool, is still developing its ecosystem and gaining traction in the IaC space.
Ease of Extensibility: Terraform offers a rich plugin architecture, making it highly extensible with custom providers and modules. GeoEngineer also supports modularization and extensibility but to a lesser degree compared to Terraform. GoFormation, being lightweight and focused on simplicity, may have more limitations in terms of extensibility compared to the other tools.
Configuration File Format: GeoEngineer uses Ruby syntax for defining configurations, which can be more expressive and powerful but may require familiarity with the language. GoFormation simplifies configuration by using JSON or YAML, making it more accessible to users with varying levels of programming experience. Terraform uses its unique HCL language, which strikes a balance between readability and flexibility.

GeoEngineer vs GoFormation vs Terraform

Overview