Terraform from HashiCorp is a cloud infrastructure automation tool that enables users to create, change, and improve production infrastructure, and it allows infrastructure to be expressed as code. It codifies APIs into declarative configuration files that can be shared amongst team members, treated as code, edited, reviewed, and versioned. It is available Open Source, and via Cloud and Self-Hosted editions.
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Liquibase
Score 8.6 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Liquibase is a database change management tool that extends DevOps best practices to the database, helping teams release software faster and safer by bringing the database change process into existing CI/CD automation. According to the 2021 Accelerate State of DevOps Report, elite performers are 3.4 times more likely to incorporate database change management into their process than low performers. Liquibase value proposition: Liquibase speeds up the development…
These other products were for infrastucture as code and not as well-suited for managing database changes; instead Liquibase was more oriented towards it and was easier to pick up its syntax also.
Anything that needs to be repeated en masse. Terraform is great at taking a template and have it be repeated across your estate. You can dynamically change the assets they're generating depending on certain variables. Which means though templated assets will all be similar, they're allowed to have unique properties about them. For example flattening JSON into tabular data and ensuring the flattening code is unique to the file's schema.
Liquibase is very well suited for database schema management. It works great for any DDL/DML deployments, changes made to database are easy to manage, track or troubleshoot. It comes with a wide variety of Rollback options. Liquibase Policy checks are a great way to enforce standards around Database code development across organization and prevent any unexpected from being deployed
The language itself is a bit unusual and this makes it hard for new users to get onboarded into the codebase. While it's improving with later releases, basic concepts like "map an array of options into a set of configurations" or "apply this logic if a variable is specified" are possible but unnecessarily cumbersome.
The 'Terraform Plan' operation could be substantially more sophisticated. There are many situations where a Terraform file could never work but successfully passes the 'plan' phase only to fail during the 'apply' phase.
Environment migrations could be smoother. Renaming/refactoring files is a challenge because of the need to use 'Terraform mv' commands, etc.
Reducing Compatibility issues, when we upgraded Liquibase from 4.2 to 4.9. The same changeset which we were able to run on successfully using 4.2, part of it was now failing when tried to deploy using 4.9
We are not able to see detailed logs (for different changes) in uDeploy when deploying changes through Liquibase
Liquibase should rollback the if any one of the changes fails.
We are and will continue using Liquibase and it has become an integral part of our portfolio offering, any new product is by default adopting Liquibase stack.
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
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.
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.
I gave this rating because I feel their customer support staff have a very good and deep knowledge about the product and they are very helpful when we are stuck on something. The customer support is passionate about their product and they are always ready to help their customer as quickly as possible.
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.
There is no real competitor when it comes to what Liquibase does - at least not at the time we considered it three years ago. It was an easy choice in this regard, but we could have said no to it if it made our workload more difficult. But our proof of concept showed there were easy wins to be had by implementing its software.
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
