OPTIMIZING CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE DEPLOYMENTS USING INFRASTRUCTURE AS CODE: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF TERRAFORM AND CLOUDFORMATION

Abstract

An acceleration of the trend toward infrastructure deployment methods that are automated, scalable, and repeatable has occurred as a result of the growing popularity of cloud computing. It is possible to accomplish this transformation with the help of Infrastructure as Code (IaC), which defines infrastructure through code rather than through human setups. Using a log-driven experimental technique, this paper gives a comparative evaluation of two leading Integrated Containerization (IaC) solutions, namely Terraform and Amazon Web Services CloudFormation. Both tools were used to provision identical Amazon Web Services environments, and a total of 110 controlled deployment iterations were carried out for both of them under circumstances that were consistent. Key performance indicators, such as the percentage of successful deployments, the amount of time it takes to provision, and the number of times errors occur, were gathered from the logs that were generated by the system. According to the findings, both tools have a high degree of dependability, as evidenced by the fact that the overall deployment success rate is 94.55% and the bulk of deployments (80%) are completed within ten minutes. There were very few instances of failures occurring, with 87.27 percent of deployments operating without any faults. In addition to highlighting the operational efficiency and stability of both Terraform and CloudFormation, these findings also provide empirical insights that can assist cloud architects in picking the installation and configuration tool that is the most appropriate for their particular deployment requirements.