Mesosphere vs Terraform: What are the differences?
What is Mesosphere? Combine your datacenter servers and cloud instances into one shared pool. Mesosphere offers a layer of software that organizes your machines, VMs, and cloud instances and lets applications draw from a single pool of intelligently- and dynamically-allocated resources, increasing efficiency and reducing operational complexity.
What is Terraform? Describe your complete infrastructure as code and build resources across providers. 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.
Mesosphere belongs to "Cluster Management" category of the tech stack, while Terraform can be primarily classified under "Infrastructure Build Tools".
Some of the features offered by Mesosphere are:
- Built on top of open source technology
- Grow to tens of thousands of nodes effortlessly while dynamically allocating resources with ease.
- Mesosphere keeps your apps running by rebalancing resources and restarting failed tasks automatically.
On the other hand, Terraform provides the following key features:
- 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.
"Devops" is the primary reason why developers consider Mesosphere over the competitors, whereas "Infrastructure as code" was stated as the key factor in picking Terraform.
Terraform is an open source tool with 17.7K GitHub stars and 4.83K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Terraform's open source repository on GitHub.
According to the StackShare community, Terraform has a broader approval, being mentioned in 509 company stacks & 312 developers stacks; compared to Mesosphere, which is listed in 12 company stacks and 8 developer stacks.
