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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Sonatype Platform
Score 8.6 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Sonatype secures the software supply chain and protects organizations' vital software development lifecycle(SDLC). The platform unites security teams and developers to accelerate digital innovation without sacrificing security or quality across the SDLC. With users among more than 2,000 organizations and 15 million software developers, Sonatype tools and guidance help users to deliver and maintain exceptional and secure software.
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for use of the Sonatype Nexus Repository Community Edition
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.
- Guidance on remediation is very good - Vulnerability detection is very good - Support is very good - Ability to ask PMs/POs open questions at Office Hours every month is very good - Support for languages is lacking (TIOBE Index Top20) - Some features are un-neededly hidden and make the usage more complex then it needs to be
Nexus firewall is a great feature enabled for all our proxy repositories which are used to download the third-party opensource packages.
Nexus IQ is integrated with build stage to analyze the component against evaluation policy. This helps to figure out the application security standards.
Nexus IQ is also having a feature to scan container images before it uploads to our private repository. This is great feature for container platforms.
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.
Sonatype supports more than 200 dev(s). It proves with the repository to store the artifacts. Allows for governance of open source software used by the different teams. It is used by security teams to scan for vulnerabilities in software(s) and in the deployed containers. It helps ensure code quality.
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
Overall experience is great with the Platform; however, I see some opportunity with upgrading the platform as it is missing with data of historical scans to allow reviewer to get view of trend how the application/product development team is considering fixing the issues.
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.
Sonatype products are great value as I said but a few areas like how products use underlying resources in order to make it further lightweight, is something I would like them to consider.
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.
Out of other products we evaluated before choosing Sonatype, the later looked far more user friendly, easy to understand and work with. This was key for us, as the tool needs to be used by many engineers that don't have security as their main focus. Having a tool that is easy to understand and work with, makes the process of evaluating open source dependencies much easier and appealing for developers.
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
