Yevgeniy Brikman
Jul 25, 2017 · 1 min read

I can’t help but feel comparing configuration management to infrastructure orchestration is very apples-to-oranges.

I understand the gist of what you’re saying, but in the real world, comparing apples and oranges is useful. There are many, many people in the world (including the ~100k who read this post) who want to know the trade-offs between Terraform, Ansible, Chef, Puppet, and so on. The fact that they are configuration management or provisioning tools is actually an important point of comparison and not a reason to discount the comparison entirely!

I agree that these tools can be used together; I even brought up the Docker + Terraform or Packer + Terraform example. Terraform + Ansible is also a reasonable approach. Chef and Puppet, probably less so. Understanding how these tools are different and how they can be combined is precisely the point of this post.

    Yevgeniy Brikman

    Written by

    Co-founder of Gruntwork, Author of “Hello, Startup” and “Terraform: Up & Running”