github.com/muratcelep/terraform@v1.1.0-beta2-not-internal-4/website/intro/vs/chef-puppet.html.markdown (about)

     1  ---
     2  layout: "intro"
     3  page_title: "Terraform vs. Chef, Puppet, etc."
     4  sidebar_current: "vs-other-chef"
     5  description: |-
     6      How Terraform compares to configuration management tools like Chef and Puppet. 
     7  ---
     8  
     9  # Terraform vs. Chef, Puppet, etc.
    10  
    11  Configuration management tools install and manage software on a machine
    12  that already exists. Terraform is not a configuration management tool,
    13  and it allows existing tooling to focus on their strengths: bootstrapping
    14  and initializing resources.
    15  
    16  Terraform focuses on the higher-level abstraction of the datacenter and
    17  associated services, while allowing you to use configuration management
    18  tools on individual systems. It also aims to bring the same benefits of
    19  codification of your system configuration to infrastructure management.
    20  
    21  If you are using traditional configuration management within your compute
    22  instances, you can use Terraform to configure bootstrapping software like
    23  cloud-init to activate your configuration management software on first
    24  system boot.