LXD vs Terraform

Overview

Terraform

Stacks22.9K

Followers14.7K

Votes344

GitHub Stars47.0K

Forks10.1K

LXD

Stacks104

Followers194

Votes68

LXD vs Terraform: What are the differences?

Container-based vs Infrastructure as Code: LXD is a container-based solution that focuses on managing and running Linux containers, providing lightweight virtualization, while Terraform is an Infrastructure as Code tool that allows the provisioning and management of infrastructure resources in a declarative way.
Scope of Management: LXD primarily deals with managing containers and containerized applications, providing a high level of control over container environments. On the other hand, Terraform has a broader scope and can manage a wide range of resources across different cloud providers and services, enabling infrastructure deployment and configuration.
Application Deployment Focus: LXD is more suitable for deploying and managing applications within containers, providing isolation and resource efficiency for applications. Terraform, however, focuses on infrastructure provisioning and automation, allowing for the configuration of entire environments that support application deployment.
Resource Abstraction Level: LXD operates at a lower level of abstraction, working directly with containers, storage, and networking configurations. In contrast, Terraform abstracts infrastructure components into easily manageable and repeatable modules, allowing for more efficient and scalable infrastructure management.
State Management: LXD does not have built-in state management capabilities, relying on the underlying container runtime for state tracking. Terraform, on the other hand, maintains a state file that keeps track of the current state of the infrastructure and helps in planning and executing changes efficiently.
Community Support and Ecosystem: Terraform has a larger community and ecosystem with numerous plugins, providers, and modules available to extend its functionality and integrate with various services and platforms, providing a more robust and versatile infrastructure automation solution than LXD.

In Summary, LXD is more focused on container management and application deployment, while Terraform is geared towards infrastructure provisioning and automation with a broader scope and higher level of abstraction.

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CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Advice on Terraform, LXD

Sung Won

Nov 4, 2019

Decidedon

Google Cloud IoT Core

Terraform

Python

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

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

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	LXD
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.	LXD isn't a rewrite of LXC, in fact it's building on top of LXC to provide a new, better user experience. Under the hood, LXD uses LXC through liblxc and its Go binding to create and manage the containers. It's basically an alternative to LXC's tools and distribution template system with the added features that come from being controllable over the network.
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 -
GitHub Forks 10.1K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 22.9K	Stacks 104
Followers 14.7K	Followers 194
Votes 344	Votes 68
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 10 More simple 8 Best 8 Open Source 8 API 7 Cluster
Integrations
Heroku Amazon EC2 CloudFlare DNSimple Microsoft Azure Consul Equinix Metal DigitalOcean OpenStack Google Compute Engine	LXC

What are some alternatives to Terraform, LXD?

Docker

The Docker Platform is the industry-leading container platform for continuous, high-velocity innovation, enabling organizations to seamlessly build and share any application — from legacy to what comes next — and securely run them anywhere

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.

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

LXC

LXC is a userspace interface for the Linux kernel containment features. Through a powerful API and simple tools, it lets Linux users easily create and manage system or application containers.

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

Related Comparisons

LXD vs Terraform: What are the differences?

Container-based vs Infrastructure as Code: LXD is a container-based solution that focuses on managing and running Linux containers, providing lightweight virtualization, while Terraform is an Infrastructure as Code tool that allows the provisioning and management of infrastructure resources in a declarative way.
Scope of Management: LXD primarily deals with managing containers and containerized applications, providing a high level of control over container environments. On the other hand, Terraform has a broader scope and can manage a wide range of resources across different cloud providers and services, enabling infrastructure deployment and configuration.
Application Deployment Focus: LXD is more suitable for deploying and managing applications within containers, providing isolation and resource efficiency for applications. Terraform, however, focuses on infrastructure provisioning and automation, allowing for the configuration of entire environments that support application deployment.
Resource Abstraction Level: LXD operates at a lower level of abstraction, working directly with containers, storage, and networking configurations. In contrast, Terraform abstracts infrastructure components into easily manageable and repeatable modules, allowing for more efficient and scalable infrastructure management.
State Management: LXD does not have built-in state management capabilities, relying on the underlying container runtime for state tracking. Terraform, on the other hand, maintains a state file that keeps track of the current state of the infrastructure and helps in planning and executing changes efficiently.
Community Support and Ecosystem: Terraform has a larger community and ecosystem with numerous plugins, providers, and modules available to extend its functionality and integrate with various services and platforms, providing a more robust and versatile infrastructure automation solution than LXD.

LXD vs Terraform

Overview