Not all software tools are created equal, and one solution may be more useful to your DevOps needs than another. Read on to learn more about two popular DevOps tools: Terraform and Puppet.
If you’re trying to choose the best DevOps tool for your organization, you’ve come to the right place. This article provides a comprehensive review of Terraform and Puppet, two popular tools that offer DevOps solutions for businesses and organizations. In our comparison, we’ll look at the key DevOps features and capabilities of each product so you can choose the best option for streamlining your application processes and services.
What is Terraform?
Terraform is an open source infrastructure-as-a-code solution provided by HashiCorp. This software solution has many aspects that are useful for DevOps processes.
What is a Puppet?
Puppet is a software configuration management tool that provides the foundation for DevOps skills. In addition, the tool allows users to use automation and collaboration features to support their DevOps management.
Terraform vs Puppet feature comparison
| HashiCorp Configuration Language | Collaboration features | Automation capabilities | DevOps -specific consulting services | Testing | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Terraform | Yes | Yes | Yes | No. | Yes |
| Puppet | No. | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Common features of Terraform and Puppet
Collaboration
Terraform has remote collaboration features that help every department of the organization communicate effectively through the DevOps process. State management is one of them. Users can manage production, updates and overall status of resources by each state of its lifecycle, as the feature has remote state storage. This way, all involved users are on the same page about the status of their resources, which reduces the space for error and miscommunication.
In addition, centralized software plans allow users to review and collaborate on decisions in one location, and they can share reusable modules with their teams. Finally, advanced plans have access permission features, which allow users to enforce policies before creating infrastructure.
Puppet also supports the integration of DevOps processes, which aims to improve collaboration with teams. Essential components include product Git and version control. The tool’s code generation includes its Gitflow process, which allows users to track, test and share their code with colleagues. Team members can make edits to existing code by making a pull request, which will show the proposed changes to the team, so that everyone can review and approve the change before it is established. Puppet also has integration services that can improve cross-team collaboration with tools like Windows, ServiceNow, HashiCorp Vault and Chocolatey.
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Automation
A high-quality DevOps tool requires automation features, and Terraform software does not fail. Automation ensures consistency throughout the production process and maintains effective workflows. The remote state feature automatically saves states for updates through subsequent runs. Terraform Cloud’s version control integration allows users to approve changes or let the system run automatically once the pull request is merged with the main branch. Of course, Terraform has default commands to guide the user within the system, and users can adjust this. For example, configuring environment variables within system controls can lose emphasis on specific commands to run.
Puppet provides users with infrastructure automation features for scaling and building cloud-native workflows. Continuous automation features help users save time and effort to devote themselves to more critical routines while the system takes care of others. The software uses idempotency to apply the code repeatedly and automate the process of configuring the servers to their desired state as defined by the user using the Puppet declarative code. Automated testing helps users stay updated on their code and infrastructure process status. Its automation features also automate the development pipeline throughout the entire application development lifecycle.
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Testing
Terraform provides users with infrastructure testing methods to verify infrastructure configuration and resources. These include unit test, contract test, integration test, end-to-end test, terraform model testing and terraform configuration testing. These tests can be run within the Terraform system, and users can automate tests to reduce the time required for manual analysis of changes and errors prior to production. Unit and contract tests can quickly automate the verification of configurations. System commands can also perform code tests at the basic level to quickly and easily identify errors.
As mentioned earlier, the Puppet software provides automated testing of the Gitflow process. However, Puppet technology also offers other ways to implement testing to ensure the quality and efficiency of module development and to avoid errors and regression. The system allows users to define guardrails and adjust parameters and variations of their code to allow testing. Users can perform acceptance testing and multi-node acceptance test in the Puppet Development Kit using the puppetlabs-ntp module. Additionally, experienced users can write their own acceptance tests to automate the maintenance of their infrastructure status.
Choosing between Terraform and Puppet
Now that you have more information about Terraform and Puppet and their related features, you can consider the capabilities they offer to their users and how well they will meet your DevOps needs. For example, your organization may want to use a tool that automatically streamlines your server configuration, making Puppet an option. But other organizations may prefer the model testing capabilities and command system features that Terraform offers. So see which tool will work better and provide more to your organization’s DevOps processes when choosing the perfect tool.