CloudFormation vs Terraform
As cloud computing continues to grow, more and more businesses are moving towards its adoption. With its advantages such as scalability, reliability, cost-effectiveness, security, and flexibility, cloud computing provides enormous benefits for businesses of all sizes. However, managing cloud resources can be challenging and time-consuming.
There are several tools available to help businesses manage their cloud resources, with CloudFormation and Terraform being the most popular. In this article, we will compare these two technologies to know which is better.
What is CloudFormation?
CloudFormation is a service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that allows businesses to model and manage their cloud resources. The service provides a simple text file format called CloudFormation templates, which can be used to define the required cloud resources. Once the templates are created, CloudFormation automatically provisions and configures the resources.
What is Terraform?
Terraform is an open-source tool for building, changing, and managing infrastructure. It helps businesses automate the provisioning and management of their cloud resources. Terraform uses a simple text file format called HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) to define the resources. The tool integrates with many cloud service providers, including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and many others.
Comparison
Now that we know about these two technologies let us compare them.
Ease of use
CloudFormation is relatively easy to use and requires minimal setup. The service provides a user-friendly web interface that allows users to create and manage CloudFormation stacks. However, the CloudFormation templates can be quite verbose, which makes them challenging to read and understand.
Terraform, on the other hand, has a steeper learning curve as it requires more setup. Users need to download and install Terraform on their local machines, set up a backend to store state, and write HCL code to define the resources. However, once set up, Terraform can be more comfortable for users to manage their resources.
Portability
Terraform is a more portable tool as it supports many cloud service providers. The tool can be used to manage resources from different cloud service providers with ease. Terraform allows for a single configuration to be used to manage resources across multiple platforms.
CloudFormation, on the other hand, is only limited to AWS resources. This means that if a business decides to switch from AWS to a different platform or wants to use resources from multiple service providers, they will need to use a different tool.
Cost
Both CloudFormation and Terraform are free to use. However, there may be costs associated with managing cloud resources.
Performance
Both CloudFormation and Terraform are quite performant. However, Terraform is known to have better performance due to its ability to manage many resources simultaneously.