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.
I'm beginning to look at Pulumi. In my opinion, it looks like it would be a good replacement for HashiCorp Terraform, and it has the advantage of configuration via scripting, rather than via HCL, which is HashiCorp Terraform configuration markup language. In my opinion, the …
Verified User
Manager
Chose HashiCorp Terraform
We have used Vagrant to develop our application in a virtual box environment and prepare it to be packed with Packer. The image created from these two tools will be deployed by Terraform.
We are using Consul for service discovery and as a job locking so we don't have two jobs or …
Verified User
Engineer
Chose HashiCorp Terraform
CloudFormation is only for AWS so if you're trying to deploy to another cloud provider then Terraform is your product. Terraform has lots of public support so you can find answers to questions by Googling. CloudFormation is easy to view the resources/services that are …
AWS CloudFormation is better if you just want to stick with AWS because it's integration with AWS is better, provides auto-rollback in case of failures, and has GUI to manage and view the stacks built. Terraform is better when we want to stay cloud-agnostic. Terraform is better …
Terraform is a large step ahead of the previous generation of infrastructure-as-code providers. I'd never go back to, e.g. Puppet or Chef, Ansible, etc. That said I think that Pulumi has a good chance of displaying it, in no small part because the Terraform language itself …
I can't find these applications listed, but other IaC tools I have used include: AWS CloudFormation, Azure Resource Manager Templates, and GCP Cloud Deployment Templates. For a comparable tool, I have the most experience with CloudFormation.
Chef and Terraform are not apples to apples because Chef is more focused on config management, whereas Terraform is more focused on provisioning. However, I can say that where they do overlap in configuration management is that Terraform is the preferred tool because it has an …
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 …
Terraform is open source and has strong community support. It is cloud-agnostic versus competing products like AWS cloud formation, hence has a distinct advantage. The scripts once set up are easy for developers to administer during development, hence during production …
- Terraform syntax is much easier to read and learn than Cloud Formation.
- Terraform already supports AWS as well as several other cloud providers.
- Terraform is backed by a great and supportive open-source community.
Terraform shares the methodology of creating configuration files for your infrastructure with tools like CloudFormation. However, Terraform is cloud-agnostic unlike CloudFormation which is AWS specific. Terraform can be used to maintain AWS and OpenStack clusters …
CloudFormation is the lingua franca of AWS. You certainly can't go wrong using it, but I like the syntax and open-source nature of Terraform. That's mostly a personal preference. I have not tried any other non-Amazon tools for provisioning AWS. And, of course, the AWS tools …
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.
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.
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 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