Serverless vs Terraform: What are the differences?
What is Serverless? The most widely-adopted toolkit for building serverless applications. Build applications comprised of microservices that run in response to events, auto-scale for you, and only charge you when they run. This lowers the total cost of maintaining your apps, enabling you to build more logic, faster. The Framework uses new event-driven compute services, like AWS Lambda, Google CloudFunctions, and more.
What is Terraform? Describe your complete infrastructure as code and build resources across providers. With Terraform, you describe your complete infrastructure as code, even as it spans multiple service providers. Your servers may come from AWS, your DNS may come from CloudFlare, and your database may come from Heroku. Terraform will build all these resources across all these providers in parallel.
Serverless can be classified as a tool in the “Serverless / Task Processing” category, while Terraform is grouped under “Infrastructure Build Tools”.
“API integration “ is the top reason why over 10 developers like Serverless, while over 81 developers mention “Infrastructure as code” as the leading cause for choosing Terraform.
Serverless and Terraform are both open source tools. Serverless with 31.3K GitHub stars and 3.53K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Terraform with 18.2K GitHub stars and 4.92K GitHub forks.
Uber Technologies, Instacart, and Slack are some of the popular companies that use Terraform, whereas Serverless is used by Plista GmbH, Hammerhead, and Droplr. Terraform has a broader approval, being mentioned in 667 company stacks & 1273 developers stacks; compared to Serverless, which is listed in 165 company stacks and 236 developer stacks.
