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 8.3 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.
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.
Incident response is well suited to OpsGenie, and this is where it really shines—whether it's an outage, a security incident, or similar. My experience is mostly with security, and it offers a great audit trail. It minimises the need to cut and paste from different platforms when creating reports and ensures that what was said and what was done (along with any evidence) is persisted and reflected in the incident detail.
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.
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
In general terms OpsGenie is a well done tool for solving the alert incident management, the usability is super ok during the configuration and during the alert. The main opportunity I found is the reporting and analytics section which is a little difficult to understand at a first sight and the refresh is not automatic, some little frictions but frictions at all
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
Helped us track bugs and issues that came up during product launch periods which reduced overhead that normally came with needing to manually contact the right team members
Prevented last minute breaking issues from falling through the cracks, decreased time to fix by automatically alerting the team members and allowing the product and project teams to easily see what active alerts are in progress