IBM Terraform vs. Open Source Puppet

IBM Terraform does a great job in managing cloud infra workloads. The problem statement is, as a organization we lack the ability to deploy repeatable infra across our cloud platform and we need that infra to be compliant, secure and easy to deploy. The second problem statement is to integrate your infra deployment into your software pipeline with some type of ci pipeline.

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• Standardised templating - Great for repetitive tasks or processes. For example flattening JSON files into tables. We can make a Terraform template which can be duplicated and used for many different file schemas.
• Dynamic/static variables - Getting information about the stage/instance Terraform is running in can help dynamically generate assets. E.g. making prod vs dev vs non-live assets based on the instance to Git branch.
• Vast array of connectors - Terraform seems to connect with lots of different technologies, and are often maintained by the tech provider so you know it's going to be designed in the best way possible for that tech.

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• 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.

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

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We need to work with different products, and it can be a bit painful, but I see IBM's strategy as bringing the whole workflow together, like Ansible, Terraform, and so on, which is very useful. Now, I guess it is important to unify it in one place.

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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.

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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.

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

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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 if we are using multiple cloud resources for our solution.

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• The entire mission-critical infrastructure is managed as code, with access control & version control.
• Very trivial to setup daily job to compare actual infra vs code to detect & alert drifts.
• Familiar to build & maintain means lower cost of ownership.