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Terraform vs VirtualBox: What are the differences?
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Terraform is an Infrastructure as Code tool used for provisioning and managing cloud infrastructure resources declaratively, while VirtualBox is a hypervisor that allows you to create and run virtual machines on your local machine.
- Cloud vs Local: Terraform is typically used for managing cloud infrastructure resources from providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, while VirtualBox is primarily used for creating and managing virtual machines on a local computer.
- Scope of Automation: Terraform is designed for automating infrastructure deployment and configuration and supports multi-cloud environments, while VirtualBox is focused on creating and managing virtual machines for development and testing purposes.
- Collaboration and Scaling: Terraform allows for collaboration among team members through version control systems and supports scaling infrastructure configurations more efficiently, whereas VirtualBox is limited to individual usage and lacks built-in collaboration features.
- Resource Management: Terraform manages resources in a state file and can track changes to infrastructure over time, allowing for easier maintenance and updates, whereas VirtualBox does not have a built-in way to manage virtual machine states or track changes.
- Flexibility and Portability: Terraform provides the flexibility to define infrastructure as code in a variety of formats and allows for easy portability between different cloud providers, while VirtualBox is limited to creating virtual machines locally and lacks the portability to move VMs easily between different host machines.
In Summary, Terraform is primarily used for automating cloud infrastructure provisioning and allows for collaboration and scaling, while VirtualBox is focused on creating and managing virtual machines locally for development and testing purposes.
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 code122
- 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 VirtualBox
- Free358
- Easy231
- Default for vagrant169
- Fast110
- Starts quickly73
- Open-source45
- Running in background42
- Simple, yet comprehensive41
- Default for boot2docker27
- Extensive customization22
- Free to use3
- Mouse integration2
- Easy tool2
- Cross-platform2
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Cons of Terraform
- Doesn't have full support to GKE1
Cons of VirtualBox
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