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Terraform VS AWS Config

Compare Terraform VS AWS Config and see what are their differences

Terraform logo Terraform

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

AWS Config logo AWS Config

Cloud Monitoring
  • Terraform Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-24
  • AWS Config Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-05-03

Terraform features and specs

  • Infrastructure as Code
    Terraform allows you to define your infrastructure in configuration files that can be versioned and stored in a version control system. This makes it easy to track changes, roll back if necessary, and collaborate with team members.
  • Multi-Cloud Support
    Terraform supports various cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and others. This allows you to manage your entire infrastructure using a single tool, regardless of the underlying provider.
  • Immutability
    Terraform promotes immutable infrastructure, meaning once a component is created, it is not modified in place but replaced if changes are needed. This leads to more predictable and stable deployments.
  • State Management
    Terraform maintains the state of your infrastructure, which helps in tracking resource changes over time and making incremental updates. This is crucial for applying changes in a controlled manner.
  • Community and Ecosystem
    Terraform has a large and active community, along with a rich ecosystem of providers and modules. This makes it easier to find support, share solutions, and leverage pre-built components.

Possible disadvantages of Terraform

  • Complex State Management
    While state management is a significant feature, managing state files can become complex and risky. Issues like state file corruption or sharing between team members can lead to challenges.
  • Learning Curve
    Terraform has a steep learning curve for beginners, especially those who are not familiar with infrastructure as code concepts or the HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL).
  • Partial Updates
    Terraform's plan and apply operations are not atomic, meaning that partial updates can sometimes leave your infrastructure in an inconsistent state if an error occurs during execution.
  • Dependency Management
    Managing dependencies between resources can be challenging in Terraform. Misconfigured dependencies can lead to issues during resource creation, deletion, or updates.
  • Cost Management
    While Terraform is excellent for provisioning resources, it does not have built-in cost management or optimization features. Users need to rely on third-party tools to manage and optimize costs.

AWS Config features and specs

  • Continuous Monitoring
    AWS Config provides continuous monitoring of AWS resources, allowing users to track changes and ensure resources remain compliant with company policies and regulations.
  • Resource Inventory
    It maintains a comprehensive inventory of resources, providing detailed historical and current configuration information to help manage AWS resources effectively.
  • Security and Compliance
    AWS Config enables security and compliance auditing by recording and evaluating configurations against desired settings and standards, facilitating swift remediation of non-compliant resources.
  • Integration with AWS Services
    Easily integrates with other AWS services such as AWS Lambda, AWS CloudTrail, and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to enhance monitoring, automation, and security.
  • Automated Evaluation
    AWS Config Rules can be used to automatically evaluate AWS resource configurations, ensuring they meet specific compliance requirements and taking corrective actions if needed.

Possible disadvantages of AWS Config

  • Cost
    AWS Config can become expensive as it records configuration changes and evaluates a large number of resources, especially in dynamic environments with many changes.
  • Complexity
    Setting up and managing AWS Config can be complex, requiring a good understanding of AWS services, IAM permissions, and compliance requirements.
  • Performance Impact
    In some cases, the continuous monitoring and recording of configuration changes might impact the performance of AWS environments, particularly in large-scale systems.
  • Limited to AWS Environment
    AWS Config is designed specifically for AWS resources and environments, which might limit its usability for organizations that rely on multi-cloud strategies or hybrid environments.

Analysis of Terraform

Overall verdict

  • Overall, Terraform is considered a robust and effective tool for infrastructure automation. It’s ideal for organizations seeking to streamline their deployment processes, ensure consistency across environments, and automate the lifecycle of their resources. Its flexibility and provider ecosystem make it a valuable asset for teams working in multi-cloud or hybrid environments.

Why this product is good

  • Terraform, developed by HashiCorp, is widely regarded as an excellent tool for infrastructure as code (IaC) due to its ability to provision and manage infrastructure across multiple cloud providers. It offers a consistent CLI workflow, and its HCL (HashiCorp Configuration Language) is powerful yet simple, allowing users to define complex infrastructure configurations in a human-readable format. Terraform’s state management, modules, and community support further contribute to its strengths, enabling efficient resource management and scalability.

Recommended for

    Terraform is particularly recommended for DevOps teams, infrastructure engineers, and IT professionals looking to implement infrastructure as code practices. It's also suitable for organizations aiming to adopt DevOps methodologies, enhance their cloud infrastructure management, or manage complex infrastructure at scale. Additionally, teams operating in multi-cloud environments or those looking to automate infrastructure changes can greatly benefit from using Terraform.

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!!!

AWS Config videos

AWS Config Tutorial

More videos:

  • Review - Manage and Track Application and Infrastructure Configuration Changes using AWS Config
  • Review - AWS Config Introduction

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Terraform and AWS Config)
DevOps Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Cloud Infrastructure
0 0%
100% 100
Developer Tools
91 91%
9% 9
Monitoring Tools
0 0%
100% 100

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 AWS Config

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%.

AWS Config Reviews

We have no reviews of AWS Config yet.
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Social recommendations and mentions

Terraform might be a bit more popular than AWS Config. We know about 32 links to it since March 2021 and only 22 links to AWS Config. 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 (32)

  • Scaffolding Serverless Web Application on AWS
    Terraform is an infrastructure as code tool that lets you build, change, and version infrastructure safely and efficiently. Terraform code is in the terraform directory. - Source: dev.to / 11 months ago
  • 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 1 year 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 / almost 2 years 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 2 years 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 2 years ago
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AWS Config mentions (22)

  • AWS Config vs Kubernetes Native Policy Engines: Who Governs What?
    AWS Config is a service that continuously monitors and records AWS resource configurations and evaluates them against desired states. Think of it as a compliance engine: it tracks configuration changes and helps you answer questions like: - Are my EKS clusters configured securely? - Are ECS tasks using only approved IAM roles? - Is anything exposed to the public internet unintentionally? - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • AWS Config: Automate Your Cloud Compliance and Security
    Ref: What is AWS config Credits to aws for the cover page image I used. - Source: dev.to / 2 months ago
  • 🚀🚀Setting Up AWS Firewall Manager Used For Auditing Security Groups in AWS Organization accounts.
    Ii) AWS Config must be enabled in all member accounts (Firewall Manager relies on AWS Config for resource visibility). - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • What is Configuration Drift?
    Cloud providers offer services to detect, manage, and remediate configuration drift in their environments. Because cloud environments often become large and complex, services such as AWS Config, Azure Policy, and Workload Manager Evaluation can help continuously monitor and evaluate cloud resources and their configurations according to rules. - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
  • Scanning AWS S3 Buckets for Security Vulnerabilities
    Regularly audit and monitor your S3 bucket configurations: Establish a routine for auditing and monitoring your S3 bucket configurations. You can also set up alerts for any changes to permissions or policies, enabling timely detection and response to potential security incidents. Additionally, you can utilize tools and services such as AWS Config, which helps you assess, audit, and evaluate the configuration of... - Source: dev.to / 10 months ago
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What are some alternatives?

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

Rancher - Open Source Platform for Running a Private Container Service

Amazon CloudWatch - Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring service for AWS cloud resources and the applications you run on AWS.

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

Steampipe - Steampipe: select * from cloud; The extensible SQL interface to your favorite cloud APIs select * from AWS, Azure, GCP, Github, Slack etc.

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

Google StackDriver - Stackdriver provides monitoring services for cloud-powered applications.