Terraform or Cloud Native Templates ?

What is terraform?
tldr. Terraform is a yaml templating engine which does infrastructure as code. You can have an entire or part of your IT infrastructure as some yaml code and deploy it to your private or public cloud.

What is Cloud Native Template?
Azure Resource Manager (ARM), AWS Cloud Formation (CF), Google Cloud Deployment Manager (CDM) are native templating engines just like terraform but mostly in json format.

Psql steps:

1. provision an sql database
2. Store secrets generated to some vault (ex:- credentials for the database)
3. apply a custom configuration
4. create few users and roles
5. create few tables
6. run pre defined psql commands against it
7. connect it to some application

Endpoints:

1. AWS
2. Azure
3. GCP

Now let us say you are asked to develop 1 terraform template for each of the above endpoints (cloud providers) and also the Cloud Native Templates too.

Why Terraform?

86% Common Code and thus

• 86% Faster design and discovery
• 86% Faster development cycle
• 86% Faster testing
• 86% Faster deployment
• 86% Faster UAT (User Acceptance Test)
• 86% greater mobility between cloud vendors
• Greater community support
• Greater availability of code
• Can write custom features, resources or providers if you are know go very well.

Why not terraform?

• There are some features of cloud vendors which are not yet exposed in terraform by the vendor

Why Cloud native templates?

• You are not planning to move your work load to another cloud or you don't mind vendor lock in.
• You are looking for some features of the cloud providers which aren't yet available on terraform.

Why not Cloud Native Templates?

• 86% slower design and discovery
• 86% slower development cycle
• 86% slower testing
• 86% slower deployment
• 86% slower  UAT (User Acceptance Test)
• 86% lower mobility between cloud vendors
• Lower community support
• Lower availability of code
• Can't write custom features, resources or providers if you are know go very well.