Terraform vs Yeoman

Overview

Yeoman

Stacks1.7K

Followers1.3K

Votes396

GitHub Stars10.1K

Forks730

Terraform

Stacks22.9K

Followers14.7K

Votes344

GitHub Stars47.0K

Forks10.1K

Terraform vs Yeoman: What are the differences?

Developers describe Terraform as "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. On the other hand, Yeoman is detailed as "A set of tools for automating development workflow". Yeoman is a robust and opinionated set of tools, libraries, and a workflow that can help developers quickly build beautiful, compelling web apps. It is comprised of yo - a scaffolding tool using our generator system, grunt - a task runner for your build process and bower for dependency management.

Terraform belongs to "Infrastructure Build Tools" category of the tech stack, while Yeoman can be primarily classified under "Front End Scaffolding Tools".

Some of the features offered by Terraform are:

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.

On the other hand, Yeoman provides the following key features:

Lightning-fast scaffolding — Easily scaffold new projects with customizable templates (e.g HTML5 Boilerplate, Bootstrap), RequireJS and more.
Great build process — Not only do you get minification and concatenation
I also optimize all your image files, HTML, compile your CoffeeScript and Compass files, if you're using AMD, I will pass those modules through r.js so you don't have to.

"Infrastructure as code" is the primary reason why developers consider Terraform over the competitors, whereas "Lightning-fast scaffolding" was stated as the key factor in picking Yeoman.

Terraform and Yeoman are both open source tools. Terraform with 17.4K GitHub stars and 4.77K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Yeoman with 9.23K GitHub stars and 759 GitHub forks.

Uber Technologies, DigitalOcean, and 9GAG are some of the popular companies that use Terraform, whereas Yeoman is used by eTobb, Custora, and Webedia. Terraform has a broader approval, being mentioned in 490 company stacks & 298 developers stacks; compared to Yeoman, which is listed in 204 company stacks and 200 developer stacks.

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Advice on Yeoman, Terraform

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

Yeoman	Terraform
Yeoman is a robust and opinionated set of tools, libraries, and a workflow that can help developers quickly build beautiful, compelling web apps. It is comprised of yo - a scaffolding tool using our generator system, grunt - a task runner for your build process and bower for dependency management.	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.
Lightning-fast scaffolding — Easily scaffold new projects with customizable templates (e.g HTML5 Boilerplate, Bootstrap), RequireJS and more.;Great build process — Not only do you get minification and concatenation; I also optimize all your image files, HTML, compile your CoffeeScript and Compass files, if you're using AMD, I will pass those modules through r.js so you don't have to.;Automatically compile CoffeeScript & Compass — Our LiveReload watch process automatically compiles source files and refreshes your browser whenever a change is made so you don't have to.;Automatically lint your scripts — All your scripts are automatically run against JSHint to ensure they're following language best-practices.;Built-in preview server — No more having to fire up your own HTTP Server. My built-in one can be fired with just one command.;Awesome Image Optimization — I optimize all your images using OptiPNG and JPEGTran so your users can spend less time downloading assets and more time using your app.;Killer package management — Need a dependency? It's just a keystroke away. I allow you to easily search for new packages via the command-line (e.g. `bower search jquery`), install them and keep them updated without needing to open your browser.;PhantomJS Unit Testing — Easily run your unit tests in headless WebKit via PhantomJS. When you create a new application, I also include some test scaffolding for your app.	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 10.1K	GitHub Stars 47.0K
GitHub Forks 730	GitHub Forks 10.1K
Stacks 1.7K	Stacks 22.9K
Followers 1.3K	Followers 14.7K
Votes 396	Votes 344
Pros & Cons
Pros 121 Lightning-fast scaffolding 83 Automation 78 Great build process 57 Open source 49 Yo Cons 1 Even harder to debug than Javascript	Pros 121 Infrastructure as code 73 Declarative syntax 45 Planning 28 Simple 24 Parallelism Cons 1 Doesn't have full support to GKE
Integrations
Bower Grunt	Heroku Amazon EC2 CloudFlare DNSimple Microsoft Azure Consul Equinix Metal DigitalOcean OpenStack Google Compute Engine

What are some alternatives to Yeoman, Terraform?

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

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

Webmin

It is a web-based interface for system administration for Unix. Using any modern web browser, you can setup user accounts, Apache, DNS, file sharing and much more. It removes the need to manually edit Unix configuration files.

Mina

Mina works really fast because it's a deploy Bash script generator. It generates an entire procedure as a Bash script and runs it remotely in the server. Compare this to the likes of Vlad or Capistrano, where each command is run separately on their own SSH sessions. Mina only creates one SSH session per deploy, minimizing the SSH connection overhead.

Related Comparisons

Some of the features offered by Terraform are:

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.

On the other hand, Yeoman provides the following key features:

Lightning-fast scaffolding — Easily scaffold new projects with customizable templates (e.g HTML5 Boilerplate, Bootstrap), RequireJS and more.
Great build process — Not only do you get minification and concatenation
I also optimize all your image files, HTML, compile your CoffeeScript and Compass files, if you're using AMD, I will pass those modules through r.js so you don't have to.

"Infrastructure as code" is the primary reason why developers consider Terraform over the competitors, whereas "Lightning-fast scaffolding" was stated as the key factor in picking Yeoman.

Terraform vs Yeoman