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If you’re using a provisioning tool such as Terraform to deploy machine images created by Docker or Packer, then every “change” is actually a deployment of a new server (just like every “change” to a variable in functional programming actually returns a new variable). Over time, as you apply more and more updates, each server builds up a unique history of changes. This often leads to a phenomenon known as configuration drift, where each server becomes slightly different than all the others, leading to subtle configuration bugs that are difficult to diagnose and nearly impossible to reproduce.

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For example, if you tell Chef to install a new version of OpenSSL, it’ll run the software update on your existing servers and the changes will happen in-place. Mutable Infrastructure vs Immutable InfrastructureĬonfiguration management tools such as Chef, Puppet, Ansible, and SaltStack typically default to a mutable infrastructure paradigm.

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And if all you need to do is provision a bunch of servers, then a provisioning tool like Terraform is typically going to be a better fit than a configuration management tool (here’s an example of how to use Terraform to deploy Docker on AWS). Once you have such an image, all you need is a server to run it. With Docker and Packer, you can create images (such as containers or virtual machine images) that have all the software your server needs already installed and configured. In particular, we’ve found that if you use Docker or Packer, the vast majority of your configuration management needs are already taken care of. But the focus on configuration management or provisioning means that some of the tools are going to be a better fit for certain types of tasks. These two categories are not mutually exclusive, as most configuration management tools can do some degree of provisioning and most provisioning tools can do some degree of configuration management.

CloudFormation and Terraform are provisioning tools, which means they are designed to provision the servers themselves (as well as the rest of your infrastructure, like load balancers, databases, networking configuration, etc), leaving the job of configuring those servers to other tools.

Mutable Infrastructure vs Immutable InfrastructureĬhef, Puppet, Ansible, and SaltStack are all configuration management tools, which means they are designed to install and manage software on existing servers.

Configuration Management vs Provisioning.

Here are the main trade-offs we considered: As with all technology decisions, it’s a question of trade-offs and priorities, and while your particular priorities may be different than ours, we hope that sharing our thought process will help you make your own decision. In this post, we’re going to dive into some very specific reasons for why we picked Terraform over the other IAC tools. It’s a bit like telling a programming newbie that you could be equally successful building a website with PHP, C, or Assembly - a statement that’s technically true, but one that omits a huge amount of information that would be incredibly useful in making a good decision. And while that’s technically true, it’s not helpful. What makes this even harder is that most of the comparisons you find online between these tools do little more than list the general properties of each tool and make it sound like you could be equally successful with any of them. All of them are well documented, both in tprimierms of official documentation and community resources such as blog posts and StackOverflow questions. All of them are open source, backed by large communities of contributors, and work with many different cloud providers (with the notable exception of CloudFormation, which is closed source and AWS-only). All of these tools can be used to manage infrastructure as code. What’s not easy is figuring out which one of these you should use. If you search the Internet for “infrastructure-as-code”, it’s pretty easy to come up with a list of the most popular tools:

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