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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OpsGenie
Score 8.6 out of 10
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OpsGenie is an IT monitoring and incident response platform for development and operations teams, providing alerts and schedule management escalations. OpsGenie is now part of Atlassian since the late 2018 acquisition.
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.
Well suited for cases where you just need to alert relevant team members when alerts and incidents come in and make sure that nothing falls through the cracks. Generally OpsGenie just forwards the alerts it receives and allows you to schedule team members to be on-call. It's good for that simple use case and extra helpful if you have Jira or Atlassian Open DevOps since it has nice integrations with those platforms and you can easily monitor ticket progress. If you don't have those, it would be good to check and see if they integrate with whatever you use to track tickets or bugs. The dashboarding and analytics are relatively basic so if you're looking for extensive and highly customizable analytics, this might not be the right solution.
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.
OpsGenie New Jira design has made it difficult for those not familiar with that style.
OpsGenie could benefit from nested escalation flows for team schedules. Creating a product alert that uses and Tech Schedule as well as an Incident Manager Schedule that already exists would create less overhead and ease management.
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.
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.
We also looked at PagerDuty but decided to go with OpsGenie as it had more features on the plan we needed compared to PagerDuty which would have required us to spend a lot more for what we felt were non-premium features. Everything felt like an add-on - automation for an additional $20 a user per month seemed like a lot on top of the base plan
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
