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Terraform VS Docker

Compare Terraform VS Docker and see what are their differences

Terraform logo Terraform

Tool for building, changing, and versioning infrastructure safely and efficiently.

Docker logo Docker

Docker is an open platform that enables developers and system administrators to create distributed applications.
  • Terraform Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-24
  • Docker Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-25

Terraform videos

Wampler Terraform | Reverb Tone Report Demo

More videos:

  • Review - MOD PEDAL POWERHOUSE! Wampler TERRAFORM
  • Demo - IT'S FINALLY HERE! | Wampler Terraform Demo | It's as good as you hoped!!!

Docker videos

What is Docker in 5 minutes

More videos:

  • Tutorial - What is Docker? Why it's popular and how to use it to save money (tutorial)
  • Review - Real World PHP Dockerfile Review, from a #Docker Captain

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Terraform and Docker)
DevOps Tools
70 70%
30% 30
Developer Tools
30 30%
70% 70
Cloud Computing
33 33%
67% 67
Continuous Integration And Delivery

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Terraform and Docker

Terraform Reviews

Do not use AWS CloudFormation
Terraform, on the other hand, will occupy your shell until the directly-involved AWS service coughs up an error. No additional tooling is required. Terraform will just relay the error message from the affected service indicating what you’ve done wrong.
Top 5 Ansible Alternatives in 2022: Server Automation Solutions by Alexander Fashakin on the 19th Aug 2021 facebook Linked In Twitter
Although Terraform and Ansible are both server automation tools, there are still a few significant differences between the two. For example, Terraform is declarative while Ansible allows for both procedural configurations and declarative configurations. Also, Ansible works best as a configuration management tool while Terraform leans towards cloud orchestration.
35+ Of The Best CI/CD Tools: Organized By Category
Terraform is compatible with a wide range of Cloud providers, including Azure, VMWare, and AWS. If you’re subscribed to multiple cloud providers, Terraform is a great way to ensure that they have consistent configurations.
Why we use Terraform and not Chef, Puppet, Ansible, SaltStack, or CloudFormation
Example: Terraform and Ansible. You use Terraform to deploy all the underlying infrastructure, including the network topology (i.e., VPCs, subnets, route tables), data stores (e.g., MySQL, Redis), load balancers, and servers. You then use Ansible to deploy your apps on top of those servers.This is an easy approach to start with, as there is no extra infrastructure to run...
Ansible overtakes Chef and Puppet as the top cloud configuration management tool
Breaking these results down year-over-year, use of Ansible grew from 36% in 2018 to 41% in 2019--surpassing Chef, which grew from 36% to 37%, as well as Puppet, which grew from 34% to 37%. Rounding out the list is Terraform, which experienced a jump from 20% to 31%, and Salt, which increased in usage from 13% to 18%.

Docker Reviews

Top 6 Alternatives to XAMPP for Local Development Environments
Docker - A containerization platform that allows developers to package applications and their dependencies into containers. Docker Compose can be used to define multi-container application stacks, including web servers, databases, and other services. Features powerful portability and consistency, supports rapid building, sharing, and container management, suitable for...
Source: dev.to
The Top 7 Kubernetes Alternatives for Container Orchestration
Docker uses images as templates to create new containers using Docker engine commands such as Build -t or run -d.
Kubernetes Alternatives 2023: Top 8 Container Orchestration Tools
Docker is an open-source platform for building, managing, deploying containerized applications. Swarm is a native feature in Docker with a group of virtual or physical machines that lets you schedule, cluster, and run Docker applications. It is a Docker alternative for Kubernetes that provides high portability, agility, and high availability.
Top 12 Kubernetes Alternatives to Choose From in 2023
Docker Swarm is a native clustering and orchestration solution provided by Docker, the leading containerization platform.
Source: humalect.com
Podman vs Docker: Comparing the Two Containerization Tools
Looking to go forward with Docker? Be sure to reference the guide linked above, as well as our guide When and Why to Use Docker. To see Docker in action, you may also want to look at our guide on How to install Docker and deploy a LAMP Stack.
Source: www.linode.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Docker should be more popular than Terraform. It has been mentiond 63 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Terraform mentions (31)

  • Integrating Terraform with CI/CD Pipelines
    In recent years, there has been a significant shift towards automation of infrastructure deployment processes. One popular tool that has emerged as a key player in this space is Terraform, an open-source infrastructure as code (IaC) software tool developed by HashiCorp. This article will explore how Terraform can be integrated into continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) pipelines using GitHub Actions as an... - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • Deploying Your Outdoor Activities Map with Terraform
    Terraform is an open-source infrastructure-as-code software tool created by HashiCorp. It allows you to define and manage your infrastructure as code, making it easy to provision and manage resources across multiple cloud providers. With Terraform, you can ensure consistent and repeatable deployments, making it an ideal choice for automating your cloud infrastructure. - Source: dev.to / 9 months ago
  • Trigger CI using Terraform Cloud
    Continuous Integration(CI) pipelines needs a target infrastructure to which the CI artifacts are deployed. The deployments are handled by CI or we can leverage Continuous Deployment pipelines. Modern day architecture uses automation tools like terraform, ansible to provision the target infrastructure, this type of provisioning is called IaaC. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • Using Let's Encrypt with the Puppet Enterprise console
    Had an itch I've been meaning to scratch for a while. I build my Puppet environment using Terraform, which makes it nice and easy to tear things down and rebuild them. That is great, but it does leave me with an issue when it comes to the console SSL certificates. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • Would you give No Code tools a try, if you could export 100% of the code and let your devs take over?
    If you don't know what Terraform is, you can learn here https://terraform.io. Source: over 1 year ago
View more

Docker mentions (63)

  • How to Dockerize a Nextjs Application Using Docker
    Docker is a platform designed to simplify the process of building, shipping, and running applications. It uses containerization technology to package an application and its dependencies into a standardized unit, called a container. Containers are lightweight and portable, and ensure that the application runs consistently across different environments like Windows and Linux. - Source: dev.to / 4 days ago
  • Building an Appointment Booking app in Go
    To run locally you need to have Docker installed and running. - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
  • Deploying a Go backend to Kubernetes with Automatic Cluster Provisioning
    To run the application locally, make sure you have Docker installed and running. This is required to run Encore applications with SQL databases. - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
  • Building an event-driven system in Go using Pub/Sub
    🥐 Let's try it! Make sure you have Docker installed and running, then run encore run in your terminal and you should see the service start up. - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
  • Building a Type-Safe Microservices Backend in Go
    Before running the application, make sure you have synced the project dependencies by running go mod tidy and that you have Docker installed and running. (Docker is required when running Encore applications locally that use SQL databases.). - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Terraform and Docker, you can also consider the following products

Rancher - Open Source Platform for Running a Private Container Service

Kubernetes - Kubernetes is an open source orchestration system for Docker containers

Puppet Enterprise - Get started with Puppet Enterprise, or upgrade or expand.

Portainer - Simple management UI for Docker

Ansible - Radically simple configuration-management, application deployment, task-execution, and multi-node orchestration engine

Packer - Packer is an open-source software for creating identical machine images from a single source configuration.