website: Terraform

website/source/intro/vs/terraform.html.md

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+---
+layout: "intro"
+page_title: "Nomad vs. Terraform"
+sidebar_current: "vs-other-terraform"
+description: |-
+  Comparison between Nomad and Terraform
+---
+
+# Nomad vs. Terraform
+
+[Terraform](https://terraform.io) is a tool for building, changing, and versioning
+infrastructure safely and efficiently. Configuration files describe to Terraform
+the components needed to run a single application or your entire datacenter. Terraform
+generates an execution plan describing what it will do to reach the desired state,
+and then executes it to build the described infrastructure. As the configuration changes,
+Terraform is able to determine what changed and create incremental execution plans which can be applied.
+
+Nomad differs from Terraform in a number of key ways. Terraform is designed to support
+any type of resource including low-level components such as compute instances, storage,
+and networking, as well as high-level components such as DNS entries, SaaS features, etc.
+Terraform knows how to create, provision, and manage the lifecycle of these resources.
+Nomad runs on existing infrastructure and manages the lifecycle of applications running
+on that infrastructure.
+
+Another major distinction is that Terraform is an offline tool that runs to completion,
+while Nomad is an online system with long lived servers. Nomad allows new jobs to
+be submitted, existing jobs updated or deleted, and can handle node failures. This
+requires operating continuously instead in a single shot like Terraform.
+
+For small infrastructures with only a handful of servers or applications, the complexity
+of Nomad may not outweigh simply using Terraform to statically assign applications to
+machines. At larger scales, Terraform should be used to provision capacity for Nomad,
+and Nomad used to manage scheduling applications to machines dynamically.
+