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.
$0
Tricentis Tosca
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
Tricentis Tosca provides an approach to test
automation that is AI-powered, codeless, and end-to-end so it can test
everything in a complex IT landscape, to ensure business processes
work flawlessly no matter where changes occurs.
Its 160+ technology support helps users test everything at
the UI, API and data layer, including virtually any enterprise, custom,
homegrown and mobile application.
With its model-based approach, Tosca enables business,
QA and IT teams to…
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.
Tricentis Tosca is well suited for packaged applications like SAP, Salesforce, Workday, etc. It also works well with API testing and Web UI testing. Tosca is highly suited for Projects which require a high level of collaboration between team members across different locations. It's less suited for mobile automation, Reporting, and test scenarios with high input data.
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.
It does have a steep learning curve, A tool is often perceived capable of doing only what its user is able to achieve in accomplishing while using it. For this reason, its very necessary if for the team at Tricentis to continue doing the great work they are doing to train early adopters of this fantastic tool.
We aim to renew Tosca for our organization. What we lose in license cost is gained by having employee that do not need programming background. We also recoup a lot of the cost on the rapidity of automation. Only the support we might not use as much. I believe Tosca is here to stay at our organization
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
It can be a challenge for new users who have never used an automation tool. For example, it is hard to understand the layout of the screen and where to find how to update the data. The interface can be overwhelming at first.
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.
Tricentis team was very supportive. Support is expensive but they helped us at many level. Setting up timeline, implementation, precise questions on automation challenges. We had an account manager and technical people we could as to talk to. Support was generally timely and helping. They often proposed to come on site to help us which would cost more but could be helpful
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.
Tricentis Tosca is codeless and therefore easier to use. It's a great tool for people that would start doing automation and have no coding background. It seems like it has the same capabilities as other test automation suites but I felt it lacked a bit of capabilities on the test management suite such as defects test suites organizations etc
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
After implementing Tosca we were able to reduce the cycle time that was spent on executing regression tests manually. I would say TOSCA was able to reduce close to 30% of the time that was spent for executing test cases manually.
