Terraform

What's the difference between Terraform and technologies such as Ansible, Puppet, Chef, etc.

Difficulty: unrated

Source: bregman-arie/devops-exercises by Arie Bregman

Answer

Terraform is considered to be an IaC technology. It's used for provisioning resources, for managing infrastructure on different platforms.

Ansible, Puppet and Chef are Configuration Management technologies. They are used once there is an instance running and you would like to apply some configuration on it like installing an application, applying security policy, etc.

To be clear, CM tools can be used to provision resources so in the end goal of having infrastructure, both Terraform and something like Ansible, can achieve the same result. The difference is in the how. Ansible doesn't saves the state of resources, it doesn't know how many instances there are in your environment as opposed to Terraform. At the same time while Terraform can perform configuration management tasks, it has less modules support for that specific goal and it doesn't track the task execution state as Ansible. The differences are there and it's most of the time recommended to mix the technologies, so Terraform used for managing infrastructure and CM technologies used for configuration on top of that infrastructure.