AWS Config vs. HashiCorp Terraform

It's really good if your infrastructure services is all in AWS, that means everything could be audited and monitored using AWS config. You also can create alarms to notify you or your team about any changes on your AWS resources which is very useful to prevent abuse if you have a fairly large team. It's also very useful whenever some third party wants to audit your AWS resources, if you have a fairly comprehensive AWS config configured, the auditing process will be easy since they only need to look at your AWS config setup.

Incentivized

8 because it's currently best-in-class and is completely essential to use in contrast to not expressing your infrastructure as code. That said, new contenders are nipping at its heels, and I expect stronger tools to emerge in the coming years. Hopefully the Terraform team is able to keep pace.

Incentivized

• The ability to track changes in AWS is paramount, AWS config allows you to do this
• Allows the auditing of an AWS account
• Can view history of an account that has AWS config enabled

Incentivized

• Terraform is cloud agnostic. Just select the suitable provider for the cloud and it will do the job.
• Templating is possible to make the Terraform templates reusable.
• Variables can be created to make the templates generic so that it can be reused for different environments or resources.

Incentivized

• It's only AWS, no third party.
• Not the most intuitive interface, but with a little getting used to it is OK.

Incentivized

• The errors generated by the plan and preview commands are pretty cryptic, it can be hard for newcomers to the scripting language to understand how to address problems.
• Access controls around workspaces is limited which makes it harder to secure reduce the scope of teams ability.
• Analytics around user usage, applies and plans would be helpful for managemenet.

Incentivized

I love Terraform and I think it has done some great things for people that are working to automate their provisioning processes and also for those that are in the process of moving to the cloud or managing cloud resources. There are some quirks to HCL that take a little bit of getting used to and give picking up Terraform a little bit of a learning curve, thus the rating

Incentivized

Would rate lower for other workloads but for AWS workloads its simple to set up, cost effective and customisable. Primary use case is compliance from a governance perspective.

Incentivized

Terraform's performance is quite amazing when it comes to deployment of resources in AWS. Of course, the deployment times depend on various parameters like the number of resources to deploy and different regions to deploy. Terraform cannot control that. The only minor drawback probably shows up when a terraform job is terminated mid way. Then in many cases, time-consuming manual cleanup is required.

Incentivized

I have yet to have an opportunity to reach out directly to HashiCorp for support on Terraform. However, I have spent a great deal of time considering their documentation as I use the tool. This opinion is based solely on that. I find the Terraform documentation to have great breadth but lacking in depth in many areas. I appreciate that all of the tool's resources have an entry in the docs but often the examples are lacking. Often, the examples provided are very basic and prompt additional exploration. Also, the links in the documentation often link back to the same page where one might expect to be linked to a different source with additional information.

Incentivized

I do not know or have used any other product in AWS cloud space that matches what AWS Config provides. We have some custom built monitoring and governance, however that is there because AWS Config does not provide it currently.

Incentivized

Terraform is the solid leader in the space. It allows you to do more then just provisioning within a pre-existing servers. It is more extensible and has more providers available than it competitors. It is also open source and more adopted by the community then some of the other solutions that are available in the market place.

Incentivized

• Enforcing audit requirements
• Easy to set up alerting when there are rule breaches
• Auto remediation reduces the manual policing of such breaches

Incentivized

• we are able to deploy our infrastructure in a couple of ours in an automated and repeatable way, before this could take weeks if the work was done manually and was a lot of error prone.
• having the state file, you can see a diff of what things have changed manually out side of Terraform which is a huge plus
• if state file gets corrupted, it is very hard to debug or restore it without an impact or spending hours ..
• writing big scale code can be very challenging and hard to be efficient so it's usable by the whole team