Let’s admit, complete efficiency is impossible to achieve if businesses fail to understand the difference between essential and menial tasks. Working smart is much more crucial than spending days finishing unnecessary tasks that could be automated. Right?
And this is where automation becomes a crucial factor in business. It not only spares your time, instead helps to utilize the time to work on other essential tasks. Hence, automating a server helps in maintaining balance and replaces repetitive tasks from your daily workflow.
Today, dozens of IT automation tools are available in the market, ready to help you with the best features. And one such tool is Terraform. It is one of the leading solutions for managing IT infrastructure.
Now, take a tour of the article to know more about Terraform and the best alternatives available in the market today.
Terraform: A brief overview
In plain words, Terraform is quite a handy tool. It allows you to build, version, or change infrastructure safely and efficiently. The purpose of this tool is to support and manage the lifecycle of a broad range of resources involving physical servers, networking, and SaaS products.
The tool is created by HashiCorp. It is an open-source “Infrastructure as Code” tool. Also, being a declarative coding tool, Terraform allows developers to use a high-level configuration language known as HCL (HarshiCorp Configuration Language) to depict an on-premises infrastructure for running an application.
Terraform: Features & Benefits
- You can just use Terraform with any cloud service provider. Also, being a cross-platform solution, it is compatible with Windows, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, and Linux.
- Terraform is supported by large communities of contributors who build plugins to the platform, and hence, whichever cloud provider you use, it’s easy to find plugins, extensions, and professional supports.
- Reduces human error and automates resources.
Automation Server: Top 3 Alternatives To Terraform
You’ll find plenty of alternatives to Terraform in the market today. However, here are the best replacements to Terraform that’ll help you automate your server with ease.
Attune
Attune is one of the best replacements options for Terraform. Since it is a server automation solution similar to Terraform, you can patch, provision, and automate build procedures and compliances for physical and virtual servers.
Needless to say. Attune’s node feature helps you automate tasks and offers an easy-to-use interface for managing all your servers. Also, via node features, you can perform robust automation tasks including, configuring Docker on Raspberry Pi.
Attune: Features & Benefits
- Attune offers full-stack orchestration.
- It streamlines the tasks scheduling process and offers procedures that are portable and shareable.
- Attune applies existing scripts like running a Window batch file or PowerShell script.
- Attune is a modern interface with an agentless architecture.
Chef
Another replacement to Terraform is Chef. It is an automation tool that enables a way to define infrastructure and code. It uses a pure-Ruby, domain-specific language for writing system configurators. The types of automation done by Chef, irrespective of the size of the infrastructure, are – Infrastructure Configuration, Application Deployment, and managing Configuration across all networks.
Chef: Features & Benefits
- Chef supports various platforms including, AIX, RHEL/CentOS, Microsoft Windows, Arch Linux, Debian, and Fedora.
- You can integrate Chef with cloud-based platforms like Internap, Amazon EC2, and Google Cloud Platform.
- As a result of Chef’s maturity and flexibility, it is used by Mozilla, Facebook, HP public cloud, etc.
- Chef eases the connection of all IT infrastructure components, which makes the installation of new ones easy.
Pulumi
Pulumi and Terraform have various similarities. In short, Pulumi is just like Terraform, in which you manage, create, and deploy infrastructure as code on any cloud. It allows you to use general-purpose languages and tools to accomplish the same goals. Same as Terraform, Pulumi is open-source on GitHub and free to use.
Pulumi: Features & Benefits
- Pulumi supports Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, and C#.
- Pulumi helps you to access the full breadth of services in AWS, Azure, GCP. And also 150+ providers through a consistent SDK interface.
- Pulumi deploys and configures infrastructure that can be shared and reused by anyone and in any language.
- Also, Pulumi helps you to define and model infrastructure using various languages.
Wrapping Up
In the final analysis, it’s up to you. So, considering your organization’s requirements, choose the automation tool wisely. Also, the alternatives explained above might give you an idea about the different tools available in the market today that satisfy your organizational needs.