Compare Azure Arc vs. Terraform

Consolidate your on-premises, hybrid, and multi-cloud infrastructures effortlessly. Azure Arc provides streamlined management, accelerates application development, and ensures uniform Azure services across diverse platforms. You can seamlessly manage, oversee, and secure Windows, Linux, SQL Server, and Kubernetes clusters across data centers, the edge, and various cloud settings directly through Azure. Design and construct cloud-native applications in any location without compromising on centralized visibility and governance. By utilizing Azure, you can access innovative solutions and the advantages of the cloud by deploying consistent Azure data, applications, and machine learning services across any infrastructure. Your existing tools and workflows, such as GitHub, Terraform, and Visual Studio, can be integrated right away, allowing for immediate operational readiness. Moreover, develop applications using the same service APIs that maintain consistency across on-premises, multiple cloud environments, and edge deployments with the help of Kubernetes, ensuring a unified approach to application management. This integration not only enhances flexibility but also fosters an innovative development ecosystem that can adapt to changing business needs.

Terraform is a powerful open-source tool for managing infrastructure as code, offering a consistent command-line interface to interact with numerous cloud services. By translating cloud APIs into declarative configuration files, Terraform enables users to define their infrastructure requirements clearly. Infrastructure can be written using these configuration files, leveraging the HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL), which provides a straightforward way to describe resources through blocks, arguments, and expressions. Before making any changes to your infrastructure, executing the command terraform plan allows you to verify that the proposed execution plan aligns with your expectations. To implement the desired configuration, you can use terraform apply, which facilitates the application of changes across a wide range of cloud providers. Furthermore, Terraform empowers users to manage the entire lifecycle of their infrastructure — from creating new resources to overseeing existing ones and eventually removing those that are no longer necessary, ensuring efficient management of cloud environments. This holistic approach to infrastructure management helps streamline operations and reduces the risk of errors during deployment.