Guide G10 · DevOps path

The Tooling Landscape: Alternatives and the Multi-Cloud Map

The courses teach one main tool per job. This guide maps the alternatives you'll meet in job descriptions (OpenTofu, Pulumi, CDK/CloudFormation, Terragrunt, Atlantis; Tekton, Argo Workflows, Spinnaker, Azure DevOps; Podman, Buildah, Kaniko) and translates AWS services to Azure and GCP.

Intermediate 35 min

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The mental model

Tools change every few years; the jobs they do don't. Once you understand the JOB (define infrastructure as code, run a pipeline, build an image, reconcile a cluster from Git), learning another tool for the same job takes days, not months. This guide is a translation table: when a job ad or a new team uses a tool you haven't seen, find its job here and map it to what you already know.

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How it works inside

01Infrastructure as code

TERRAFORM (HCL, huge provider ecosystem, BSL licence since 2023) and OPENTOFU (the open-source fork under the Linux Foundation, drop-in compatible, with extras like state encryption) are the default. CLOUDFORMATION is AWS-native YAML/JSON with no state file to manage (AWS keeps it), and AWS CDK generates CloudFormation from TypeScript/Python/Java. PULUMI uses general-purpose languages (TypeScript, Python, Go, Java) against its own state, attractive to developer-heavy teams. Crossplane does IaC as Kubernetes controllers (Platform course, Stage 2).

Around Terraform: TERRAGRUNT keeps many environments DRY (shared backend config, dependencies between stacks); ATLANTIS, Spacelift, env0, and HCP Terraform run plans and applies from pull requests with locking and policy. Your Terraform course CI pipeline (Stage 7) is the do-it-yourself version of the same idea.

02CI/CD engines

GITHUB ACTIONS, GITLAB CI, and JENKINS are covered in the CI/CD course. Others you'll meet: AZURE DEVOPS PIPELINES (common in Microsoft shops; YAML stages and jobs, same concepts), CIRCLECI and BUILDKITE (hosted orchestration, self-hosted agents), TEKTON (Kubernetes-native CI with Tasks and Pipelines as CRDs), ARGO WORKFLOWS (DAGs of containers on Kubernetes, used for CI and data/ML pipelines), SPINNAKER (multi-cloud continuous delivery with deployment strategies, largely superseded by GitOps plus Argo Rollouts for new setups), and AWS CODEPIPELINE/CODEBUILD. Every one of them is a way to express 'trigger → stages → jobs → steps', with secrets and artifacts.

03Containers and clusters

PODMAN is a daemonless, rootless Docker-compatible CLI (alias docker=podman mostly works) and the default on RHEL; BUILDAH builds OCI images without a daemon; KANIKO and BuildKit build images inside Kubernetes or CI without privileged Docker-in-Docker (Docker course, Docker in CI/CD). Kubernetes distributions: EKS, AKS, GKE (managed), OPENSHIFT (Red Hat's enterprise platform with built-in builds, routes, and stricter security defaults), Rancher/RKE2, k3s (lightweight, edge), and kind/minikube (local). Nomad (HashiCorp) is a simpler scheduler alternative to Kubernetes.

04Observability, security, and GitOps alternatives

Observability: Datadog, New Relic, Dynatrace, and Elastic Observability are commercial all-in-ones; Grafana Cloud hosts the open-source stack; Victoria Metrics, Mimir, and Thanos scale Prometheus. Security scanning: Snyk, Prisma Cloud, Wiz, Aqua (commercial) alongside Trivy, Grype, Semgrep, and Checkov (open source). GitOps: Argo CD and Flux (GitOps course). Secrets: Vault/OpenBao, cloud secret managers, Doppler, Infisical (Guide G8).

Do it

Hands-on lab

The same S3 bucket in three IaC tools

Seeing one resource in several tools makes the shared concepts obvious: resource type, properties, and outputs.

bucket-three-ways.txtwhole filetext

# Terraform / OpenTofu (HCL)
resource "aws_s3_bucket" "uploads" {
  bucket = "shoplite-uploads-dev"
  tags   = { owner = "team-storefront" }
}

# AWS CloudFormation (YAML)
Resources:
  Uploads:
    Type: AWS::S3::Bucket
    Properties:
      BucketName: shoplite-uploads-dev
      Tags: [{ Key: owner, Value: team-storefront }]

# Pulumi (TypeScript)
import * as aws from "@pulumi/aws";
const uploads = new aws.s3.Bucket("uploads", {
  bucket: "shoplite-uploads-dev",
  tags: { owner: "team-storefront" },
});

2
Switch Terraform to OpenTofu
For most projects, OpenTofu reads the same code and state. Test on a copy of the state first.
terminal
$ tofu init -upgrade && tofu plan
── expected output ──
OpenTofu has been successfully initialized!
...
No changes. Your infrastructure matches the configuration.

Decide

AWS ↔ Azure ↔ Google Cloud service map

Job	AWS	Azure	Google Cloud
Virtual machines	EC2	Virtual Machines	Compute Engine
Autoscaling VMs	Auto Scaling groups	VM Scale Sets	Managed Instance Groups
Managed Kubernetes	EKS	AKS	GKE
Serverless containers	ECS Fargate / App Runner	Container Apps	Cloud Run
Functions	Lambda	Azure Functions	Cloud Run functions
Object storage	S3	Blob Storage	Cloud Storage
Block storage	EBS	Managed Disks	Persistent Disk
Managed PostgreSQL/MySQL	RDS / Aurora	Azure Database for PostgreSQL/MySQL	Cloud SQL / AlloyDB
NoSQL key-value	DynamoDB	Cosmos DB	Firestore / Bigtable
Cache	ElastiCache / MemoryDB	Azure Cache for Redis	Memorystore
Queue / pub-sub	SQS / SNS / EventBridge	Service Bus / Event Grid	Pub/Sub / Eventarc
Managed Kafka	MSK	Event Hubs (Kafka API)	Managed Service for Apache Kafka
Networking	VPC, subnets, security groups	VNet, subnets, NSGs	VPC (global), subnets, firewall rules
Load balancer (L7)	ALB	Application Gateway / Front Door	Cloud Load Balancing (HTTP(S))
DNS / CDN	Route 53 / CloudFront	Azure DNS / Front Door	Cloud DNS / Cloud CDN
Identity & access	IAM, Identity Center	Entra ID, RBAC	Cloud IAM
Secrets / keys	Secrets Manager / KMS	Key Vault	Secret Manager / Cloud KMS
Container registry	ECR	Azure Container Registry	Artifact Registry
Monitoring / logs	CloudWatch	Azure Monitor / Log Analytics	Cloud Monitoring / Cloud Logging
Audit trail	CloudTrail	Activity Log	Cloud Audit Logs
Native IaC	CloudFormation / CDK	ARM / Bicep	Infrastructure Manager (Terraform)

The bigger picture

Connects to

Terraform course

The IaC concepts every alternative shares.

CI/CD course

Pipeline concepts that transfer to any engine.

AWS course

Learn one cloud deeply; the map translates it.

Prove it

Interview questions

Terraform vs CloudFormation vs Pulumi?

You know AWS; the new job uses Azure. How do you ramp up?

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