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Terraform vs Zookeeper: What are the differences?
Introduction
When comparing Terraform and Zookeeper, it is essential to understand the key differences between these two tools.
Deployment vs Configuration Management: Terraform is primarily used for infrastructure deployment, where it provisions and manages various resources in the cloud environment. On the other hand, Zookeeper is a centralized service for maintaining configuration information, naming, and providing distributed synchronization across systems.
Language and Syntax: Terraform uses HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) to define infrastructure resources declaratively, making it easy to read and understand. In contrast, Zookeeper uses a hierarchical key-value store data model, making it more suitable for storing and managing metadata and configurations.
Scope of Use: Terraform focuses on infrastructure as code, enabling users to define and manage cloud resources efficiently. In comparison, Zookeeper is designed for distributed systems and can be utilized for coordination, synchronization, and configuration management in large-scale environments.
State Management: In Terraform, state management is crucial for tracking the current state of infrastructure resources and understanding changes that need to be applied. Zookeeper, on the other hand, does not specifically deal with state management but rather focuses on providing a reliable centralized service for distributed systems.
Community and Ecosystem: Terraform has a vast and active community with a wide range of plugins, modules, and integrations available to simplify infrastructure management tasks. Zookeeper, although popular in distributed systems, may have a more limited ecosystem compared to Terraform.
Use Cases: Terraform is commonly used for automating and managing cloud infrastructure across various cloud providers, while Zookeeper finds its applications in maintaining configuration information, providing distributed coordination, and ensuring consistency in distributed systems.
In Summary, Terraform and Zookeeper differ in their focus on deployment and configuration management, language and syntax, scope of use, state management, community support, and use cases.
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.
We use Terraform to manage AWS cloud environment for the project. It is pretty complex, largely static, security-focused, and constantly evolving.
Terraform provides descriptive (declarative) way of defining the target configuration, where it can work out the dependencies between configuration elements and apply differences without re-provisioning the entire cloud stack.
AdvantagesTerraform is vendor-neutral in a way that it is using a common configuration language (HCL) with plugins (providers) for multiple cloud and service providers.
Terraform keeps track of the previous state of the deployment and applies incremental changes, resulting in faster deployment times.
Terraform allows us to share reusable modules between projects. We have built an impressive library of modules internally, which makes it very easy to assemble a new project from pre-fabricated building blocks.
DisadvantagesSoftware is imperfect, and Terraform is no exception. Occasionally we hit annoying bugs that we have to work around. The interaction with any underlying APIs is encapsulated inside 3rd party Terraform providers, and any bug fixes or new features require a provider release. Some providers have very poor coverage of the underlying APIs.
Terraform is not great for managing highly dynamic parts of cloud environments. That part is better delegated to other tools or scripts.
Terraform state may go out of sync with the target environment or with the source configuration, which often results in painful reconciliation.
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.
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
Pros of Terraform
- Infrastructure as code121
- Declarative syntax73
- Planning45
- Simple28
- Parallelism24
- Well-documented8
- Cloud agnostic8
- It's like coding your infrastructure in simple English6
- Immutable infrastructure6
- Platform agnostic5
- Extendable4
- Automation4
- Automates infrastructure deployments4
- Portability4
- Lightweight2
- Scales to hundreds of hosts2
Pros of Zookeeper
- High performance ,easy to generate node specific config11
- Java8
- Kafka support8
- Spring Boot Support5
- Supports extensive distributed IPC3
- Curator2
- Used in ClickHouse2
- Supports DC/OS2
- Used in Hadoop1
- Embeddable In Java Service1
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Cons of Terraform
- Doesn't have full support to GKE1
Cons of Zookeeper
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What is Terraform?
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