emma vs Cloud Console vs Terraform: The Best Way to Provision VMs

In theory, launching a virtual machine should take minutes. In practice, it often takes hours, sometimes days.

Sure, you can click through a wizard, pick a region and instance size, and get a VM running quickly. But the hard part is doing it consistently across different clouds, with no standardization between their consoles.

Even harder is enforcing  governance, which is why many organizations use ticket queues and manual approvals. It slows things down – from minutes to days –  and makes provisioning more painful than it has to be.

So, in this post, we’re putting three popular VM provisioning approaches to test:

• Native Cloud Consoles – popular, but basic
• Terraform – powerful but complex
• And emma –  intuitive and built for multi-cloud simplicity

Let’s break down how each stacks up.

Cloud comparison

1. Native cloud consoles (AWS Console, Azure Portal, GCP)

Major cloud providers, like AWS, Azure, and GCP, all provide native management consoles that let you provision cloud compute via a GUI-based interface. They are visual, accessible, and familiar – but hit a wall when you’re operating at scale or across clouds.

Here’s where native consoles fall short:

• You’re locked into a single provider
• No cross-cloud standardization
• GUI-based, but offer no repeatability and limited automation
• No hard caps – you need to configure IAM rules and complex resource-level policies or enlist additional tools/services to add cost and region-based restrictions at project-level.

2. Terraform

It’s the IaC tool of choice for most DevOps and Platform engineers. You can write custom code to deploy infrastructure at scale, repeatedly and across cloud providers.

But Terraform’s powerful capabilities come at the cost of ease-of-use.

• Separate Terraform providers per cloud environment to deal with different APIs, services, and configuration structure.
• On average, organizations end up managing 8-12 Terraform providers and 50+ provider configurations across teams.
• Updating providers can introduce breaking changes.
• Version drift can happen, so you need to keep code and state files in sync, across all repositories.
• No cost visibility or real-time monitoring. Policy enforcement requires add-ons or external tooling

3. emma

emma is a no-code, cloud-agnostic platform that offers click-to-deploy capabilities across all cloud providers. It makes VM provisioning truly self-service – no YAMLs, no scripts, no ticket queues.

Here’s how emma stands out:

• Intuitive UI to launch production-ready VMs in minutes
• Support for both hyperscalers (AWS, Azure, GCP) and smaller providers (like Gcore, DigitalOcean, and OVHcloud)
• Built-in cost and lifecycle governance
• Project-level governance through enforced quotas, region restrictions, and custom schedules. Teams can skip manual approvals.
• APIs and Terraform provider available for advanced use cases.
• No need to manage multiple Terraform providers directly.

Save time with smarter provisioning

Stop provisioning like it’s 2015! emma gives you the speed of native cloud consoles and the power of Terraform, and true multi-cloud standardization, all in one platform.

• See emma’s no-code provisioning in  action: Deploy a Virtual Machine Across Multiple Locations‍
• Try VM provisioning in emma (No Sign-up required): Demo Portal