Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

Terraform

18K
14.2K
+ 1
345
Vagrant

11.4K
7.7K
+ 1
1.5K
Add tool

Terraform vs Vagrant: What are the differences?

Terraform and Vagrant are both tools used in the realm of infrastructure provisioning and management. Terraform focuses on infrastructure as code and automating the creation of resources, while Vagrant simplifies development environments setup. Here are the key differences between Terraform and Vagrant:

  1. Infrastructure Provisioning vs. Development Environments: Terraform is primarily used for provisioning and managing infrastructure resources in cloud environments. It helps define and automate the creation of resources like virtual machines, networks, and storage. Vagrant, on the other hand, is specifically designed to create and manage development environments, allowing developers to quickly set up local virtual machines for testing and development purposes.

  2. Infrastructure as Code vs. Development Environment Configuration: Terraform follows the infrastructure as code (IAC) approach, enabling users to define infrastructure resources using a declarative language. Vagrant focuses on configuring development environments using scripts and configuration files, providing a standardized setup for development teams.

  3. Cloud-Agnostic vs. Virtualization: Terraform supports multiple cloud providers and can be used to provision resources in various cloud platforms. Vagrant is more focused on virtualization, creating local development environments using tools like VirtualBox or Docker.

  4. Resource Creation vs. Environment Replication: Terraform's main goal is to create and manage infrastructure resources like servers, databases, and networking components. Vagrant's primary purpose is to replicate development environments, ensuring consistency across team members and improving collaboration.

  5. Use Case and Audience: Terraform is suitable for DevOps and infrastructure teams that need to manage and automate cloud resources at scale. Vagrant targets developers who want to create reproducible development environments quickly and efficiently.

  6. Workflow Integration: Terraform is often integrated into continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines to ensure consistent infrastructure changes. Vagrant's integration is more focused on providing a consistent development environment across team members' local machines.

In summary, Terraform is centered around provisioning and managing infrastructure resources in cloud environments using an infrastructure as code approach, while Vagrant simplifies the setup of consistent development environments for individual developers using virtualization technology.

Decisions about Terraform and Vagrant

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.

See more
Sergey Ivanov
Overview

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.

Advantages

Terraform 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.

Disadvantages

Software 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.

See more

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.
See more

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

See more
Get Advice from developers at your company using StackShare Enterprise. Sign up for StackShare Enterprise.
Learn More
Pros of Terraform
Pros of Vagrant
  • 122
    Infrastructure as code
  • 73
    Declarative syntax
  • 45
    Planning
  • 28
    Simple
  • 24
    Parallelism
  • 8
    Well-documented
  • 8
    Cloud agnostic
  • 6
    It's like coding your infrastructure in simple English
  • 6
    Immutable infrastructure
  • 5
    Platform agnostic
  • 4
    Extendable
  • 4
    Automation
  • 4
    Automates infrastructure deployments
  • 4
    Portability
  • 2
    Lightweight
  • 2
    Scales to hundreds of hosts
  • 352
    Development environments
  • 290
    Simple bootstraping
  • 237
    Free
  • 139
    Boxes
  • 130
    Provisioning
  • 84
    Portable
  • 81
    Synced folders
  • 69
    Reproducible
  • 51
    Ssh
  • 44
    Very flexible
  • 5
    Works well, can be replicated easily with other devs
  • 5
    Easy-to-share, easy-to-version dev configuration
  • 3
    Great
  • 3
    Just works
  • 2
    Quick way to get running
  • 1
    DRY - "Do Not Repeat Yourself"
  • 1
    Container Friendly
  • 1
    What is vagrant?
  • 1
    Good documentation

Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions

Cons of Terraform
Cons of Vagrant
  • 1
    Doesn't have full support to GKE
  • 2
    Can become v complex w prod. provisioner (Salt, etc.)
  • 2
    Multiple VMs quickly eat up disk space
  • 1
    Development environment that kills your battery

Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

- No public GitHub repository available -

What is Terraform?

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.

What is Vagrant?

Vagrant provides the framework and configuration format to create and manage complete portable development environments. These development environments can live on your computer or in the cloud, and are portable between Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

What companies use Terraform?
What companies use Vagrant?
See which teams inside your own company are using Terraform or Vagrant.
Sign up for StackShare EnterpriseLearn More

Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions

What tools integrate with Terraform?
What tools integrate with Vagrant?

Sign up to get full access to all the tool integrationsMake informed product decisions

Blog Posts

What are some alternatives to Terraform and Vagrant?
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.
Kubernetes
Kubernetes is an open source orchestration system for Docker containers. It handles scheduling onto nodes in a compute cluster and actively manages workloads to ensure that their state matches the users declared intentions.
Packer
Packer automates the creation of any type of machine image. It embraces modern configuration management by encouraging you to use automated scripts to install and configure the software within your Packer-made images.
Cloud Foundry
Cloud Foundry is an open platform as a service (PaaS) that provides a choice of clouds, developer frameworks, and application services. Cloud Foundry makes it faster and easier to build, test, deploy, and scale applications.
Pulumi
Pulumi is a cloud development platform that makes creating cloud programs easy and productive. Skip the YAML and just write code. Pulumi is multi-language, multi-cloud and fully extensible in both its engine and ecosystem of packages.
See all alternatives