25 lines
987 B
Markdown
25 lines
987 B
Markdown
---
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layout: "intro"
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page_title: "Terraform vs. Chef, Puppet, etc."
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sidebar_current: "vs-other-chef"
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description: |-
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How Terraform compares to configuration management tools.
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---
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# Terraform vs. Chef, Puppet, etc.
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Configuration management tools install and manage software on a machine
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that already exists. Terraform is not a configuration management tool,
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and it allows existing tooling to focus on their strengths: bootstrapping
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and initializing resources.
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Terraform focuses on the higher-level abstraction of the datacenter and
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associated services, while allowing you to use configuration management
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tools on individual systems. It also aims to bring the same benefits of
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codification of your system configuration to infrastructure management.
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If you are using traditional configuration management within your compute
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instances, you can use Terraform to configure bootstrapping software like
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cloud-init to activate your configuration management software on first
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system boot.
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