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terraform/website/intro/vs/chef-puppet.mdx

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website: initial commit
2014-07-16 23:51:48 +02:00
---
migrate docs to mdx
2021-12-15 03:41:17 +01:00
page_title: 'Terraform vs. Chef, Puppet, etc.'
description: >-
How Terraform compares to configuration management tools like Chef and
Puppet.
website: initial commit
2014-07-16 23:51:48 +02:00
---
# Terraform vs. Chef, Puppet, etc.
Cleanup of the 'Terraform vs. Custom Solutions' section.
2014-09-02 20:29:22 +02:00
Configuration management tools install and manage software on a machine
that already exists. Terraform is not a configuration management tool,
and it allows existing tooling to focus on their strengths: bootstrapping
and initializing resources.
website: initial commit
2014-07-16 23:51:48 +02:00
website: Don't claim that things are "very easy" We typically try to avoid making subjective, boasty claims in our documentation in recent times, but there remained both some older documentation that we've not recently revised and also some newer examples that are, in retrospect, also perhaps more "boasty" than they need to be. We prefer not to use this sort of boasty language because not everyone using Terraform has the same background and experience, and so what is "easy" or "intuitive" to one person may not be so to another person, and that should not suggest that the second person is in any way wrong or inadequate. In reviewing some of our use of the word "easy" here I tried as much as possible to surgically revise the existing content without getting drawn into a big rewrite, but in some cases the content was either pretty unsalvageable (due to talking about obsolete features that were removed long ago) or required some broader changes to make the result hopefully still get the same facts across. In those cases I've both removed some content entirely or adjusted larger paragraphs. This was not an exhaustive review and so I'm sure there's still plenty of room for similar improvements elsewhere. I also resisted the urge to update some pages that contain outdated information about currently-active features.
2020-10-24 03:05:19 +02:00
Terraform focuses on the higher-level abstraction of the datacenter and
associated services, while allowing you to use configuration management
tools on individual systems. It also aims to bring the same benefits of
codification of your system configuration to infrastructure management.
If you are using traditional configuration management within your compute
instances, you can use Terraform to configure bootstrapping software like
cloud-init to activate your configuration management software on first
system boot.