IBM Terraform vs. Pantheon

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

Great Cloud-based coordination platform which offers the team excellent capabilities on easy workflow management, multiple project activity tracking and easy to monitor all the project assets from one desk. Pantheon offers the best content management tools, strategic on development project life cycle management is excellent and the reporting features with Pantheon are effective and useful real-time data analytical capability.

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

• Effective use of our codebase deployment and implementation.
• The dashboard functionality and general stability and security are excellent.
• The server is quite consistent, and if you need assistance from the support team, they are very quick to respond.
• Automatic updates let me ensure that my customers have safe websites without increasing my own expense.
• The team offers excellent assistance and help for chat.

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

• Pricing structure has too large of a jump between Basic and Performance plans
• Have run into issues with prescribed WP updates not working through dashboard and having to do manually.
• Pantheon site dashboard occasionally is unavailable (the site is never affected though)

Incentivized

Still the best provisioning tool out there and good support from the community as well in terms of shared knowledge

Incentivized

The environment is stable and we have not had any issues/downtime. The annual cost is reasonable.

Incentivized

The syntax itself is pretty straightforward. The documentation is well-maintained & easy to follow. Most cloud providers, even smaller ones, maintain official provider libraries, making discovery & learning a breeze. Some, like GCP, even provide high-level libraries on top of their own more primitive provider, making building complex infra much more manageable. The language itself is cloud-agnostic, so you can literally manage resources from multiple providers in a single Terraform repo.

Monitoring of project development is very easy using a dashboard with its integration capability, showing all processes in a single screen which is easy to use and also easy to navigate through. A powerful tool that allows testing to be carried on without the user noticing any changes to the system and a highly interactive tool for groups and project members.

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

Terraform is community driven but does offer support for it's Enterprise product. When contacting the team at HashiCorp we have always gotten resolution to our issues. They have been very responsive in returning our calls and answering our questions as they come up. We are currently using the open source model.

Incentivized

Even tier 1 Pantheon chat and ticket support are knowledgeable, competent, and useful. They routinely understand and promptly resolve urgent, complex, and/or unusual issues that other hosts need to escalate to tier 2 or tier 3 support personnel. I honestly can't think of a truly negative or disappointing support experience in the years I've used Pantheon hosting for client websites.

Incentivized

Implementation is straight forward. Never had issues as the team is already very familiar with Terraform installation from previous projects and roles

Incentivized

Once the environments were up and running, the implementation was easy to synchronize with latest data prior to switchover.

Incentivized

dbt was fine, but you end up with an extremely bloated repo/project. Often where all of the models are the same, named similarly, and generally just doesn't adhere to the concept of DRY coding. In Terraform we're able to template a lot of this work and dynamically generate assets based on variables instead.

Incentivized

Acquia was terrible. We use DigitalOcean for some all-purpose computing needs and Platform.sh for an application that does more computing and high-throughput processing where we do not want page views (API calls) to count against our usage.

Incentivized

• Using code, we are able to build and deploy cloud resources faster and more consistently than producing the same resources in the console manually.
• For applications that share architectures, we can reuse code to expedite development. We can also do the same with modules that are shared across the organization.
• By defining all of our resources as code, we can deploy complete environments with "batteries included." For example, we can use code that spins up servers in a cloud provider and at the same time, creates monitors with in our monitoring provider. Likewise, when the servers are decommissioned, the monitors are decommed along with them. In the past, the creation and decom of the monitors would have been a disjointed, manual step. With Terraform we get it all with one "terraform apply."

Incentivized

• Pantheon allows ordinary sites to excel esp if there is consistent development going on behind the scenes.
• Website management is super easy and the hosting fee gets paid off as you save on developer hours.
• Expensive for those who are not consistently developing on the platform, there are other options out there at better price points.

Incentivized