What is the difference between chef, puppet, ansible and terraform?

Question

Could someone tell me what is the difference between chef, puppet, ansible and terraform?

Answer 1

Well, Chef, Puppet, Ansible, and Terraform are related to each other, because each of these tools is related to the configuration of the servers. Among these, the only odd one out is Terraform, which is a configuration orchestration tool, while all the others are configuration management tools, that are used to manage, deploy, and maintain these configurations across the servers for smooth functioning. While Terraform is used to facilitate server instances themselves and that leaves the job of configuration servers to other tools like Chef, Puppet, or Ansible, etc.

1. Among these, Chef and Ansible are written in procedural language, while all the other tools are written in Declarative language.
2. There is no Lifecycle management for all the container management tools Ansible, Chef, and Puppet, while it’s therefor Terraform.
3. Partial VM provisioning, Networking, and Storage Management is available for Puppet, Ansible, and Chef while it's full for Terraform.

If you wish to know more, check out the Puppet tutorial, Ansible tutorial, and if you wish to learn and get trained, then have a look at the DevOps course from Intellipaat. Also, have a look at our YouTube video on DevOps Tutorial made by Intellipaat’s expert team to help you get started.