| --- |
| page_title: 'Terraform vs. Chef, Puppet, etc.' |
| description: >- |
| How Terraform compares to configuration management tools like Chef and |
| Puppet. |
| --- |
| |
| # Terraform vs. Chef, Puppet, etc. |
| |
| Configuration management tools install and manage software on a machine |
| that already exists. Terraform is not a configuration management tool, |
| and it allows existing tooling to focus on their strengths: bootstrapping |
| and initializing resources. |
| |
| Terraform focuses on the higher-level abstraction of the datacenter and |
| associated services, while allowing you to use configuration management |
| tools on individual systems. It also aims to bring the same benefits of |
| codification of your system configuration to infrastructure management. |
| |
| If you are using traditional configuration management within your compute |
| instances, you can use Terraform to configure bootstrapping software like |
| cloud-init to activate your configuration management software on first |
| system boot. |
