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HashiCorp Terraform

HashiCorp Terraform

Overview

What is HashiCorp Terraform?

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…

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Fast and Reliable Infrastructure Deployment: Users appreciate Terraform's ability to deploy infrastructure quickly and reliably. Several …
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Terraform Review

8 out of 10
July 12, 2021
Terraform is currently being used to deploy infrastructure to GCP. We are mindful of the fact that some components might need other cloud …
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Terraform Review

9 out of 10
February 15, 2021
Incentivized
We use Terraform to deploy our infrastructure into AWS at an enterprise level. We support more than 700 developers across different brands …
Continue reading
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Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Pricing

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Open Source

$0

Cloud

Team & Governance

$20/user

Cloud
per user/per month

Enterprise

Contact sales team

Cloud

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://www.hashicorp.com/products/terr…

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Product Demos

Infrastructure Pipelines with Terraform Cloud

YouTube
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Product Details

What is HashiCorp Terraform?

HashiCorp Terraform is an infrastructure as code tool that lets the user define both cloud and on-prem resources in human-readable configuration files that the user can version, reuse, and share. A consistent workflow can then be used to provision and manage infrastructure throughout its lifecycle. Terraform can manage low-level components like compute, storage, and networking resources, as well as high-level components like DNS entries and SaaS features.

Terraform creates and manages resources on cloud platforms and other services through their application programming interfaces (APIs). Providers enable Terraform to work with virtually any platform or service with an accessible API.

HashiCorp Terraform Features

  • Supported: Manage any Infrastructure
  • Supported: Track your infrastructure
  • Supported: Automate changes
  • Supported: Standardize configurations

HashiCorp Terraform Screenshots

Screenshot of Terraform StateScreenshot of Terraform RunsScreenshot of Terraform VariablesScreenshot of Terraform WorkspacesScreenshot of Terraform Cost Estimation

HashiCorp Terraform Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

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.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, Jenkins, and GitHub are common alternatives for HashiCorp Terraform.

Reviewers rate Performance highest, with a score of 9.4.

The most common users of HashiCorp Terraform are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(122)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

Fast and Reliable Infrastructure Deployment: Users appreciate Terraform's ability to deploy infrastructure quickly and reliably. Several reviewers have mentioned that they were able to provision resources efficiently, saving them time and effort in the deployment process.

Modular Approach with Reusable Modules: The use of modules in Terraform is highly valued by users, as it enables repeatability and encourages code reuse. Many reviewers have stated that they find it easy to share and reuse functionality across deployments, promoting collaboration and consistency among teams.

Large Ecosystem of Modules for Various Providers: Users highly value the extensive ecosystem of modules available in Terraform for various providers. Numerous reviewers have stated that this allows them to easily access strong default configurations for many services, saving them time and effort in setting up their infrastructure.

Complex Documentation: Many users have found the documentation for the new language to be complex and lacking clear explanations, making it difficult for them to understand and use Terraform effectively. They express frustration with the lack of concise and intuitive explanations in the documentation, which hinders their ability to grasp key concepts.

Challenging Rollback Operations: Users have expressed difficulty in performing rollback operations as it must be done through version control. This process is seen as cumbersome and unintuitive, requiring extra steps that could be simplified with a dedicated rollback feature within Terraform itself.

Unusual Language Design: The language used in Terraform is considered unusual by many users, which makes it challenging for new users to understand and navigate the codebase. Some users find it unconventional compared to other infrastructure-as-code tools, leading to confusion when reading or modifying existing code.

Users have provided several recommendations for Terraform based on their experiences with the tool for automating cloud infrastructure management.

First, users suggest taking the time to understand and implement Terraform modules properly. This recommendation emphasizes the importance of familiarizing oneself with the module system in order to effectively leverage the capabilities of Terraform.

Second, users recommend reading through the documentation and reaching out to Hashicorp for assistance when facing issues. By doing so, users believe that they can overcome any challenges they encounter and make the most of Terraform's features.

Lastly, some users advise considering other Infrastructure as Code (IaC) platforms, but acknowledge that Terraform is a great and flexible open-source option. This recommendation highlights the need for users to evaluate different options before making a final decision on their cloud infrastructure automation tool.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-8 of 8)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Eric Mintz | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
I use HashiCorp Terraform to create development and production assets in AWS, Digital Ocean, and Linode environments.
  • It has a rich set of plugins to with with many cloud providers
  • It tracks the state of your assets, if they exist or need to be built or changed
  • It's easy to collaborate with others by sharing the state file
  • In my opinion, simple tasks like rebooting a server are cumbersome
  • Some cloud providers may not offer full support for all features of HashiCorp Terraform
HashiCorp Terraform is very well suited for managing cloud-based assets for major cloud providers, including private cloud environments like Xen Orchestra and Proxmox for example. However some providers don't offer support for all of the features. It's not well suited at all for configuring cloud assets; in my opinion, tools like Ansible are much better suited for that.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use Terraform to provision all our infrastructure in all major cloud providers (AWS,GCP,Azure), we have invested a lot to make our code repeatable and scalable as we need to support multiple accounts in each cloud provider.
  • Support all major cloud providers
  • good documentation
  • good support of providers
  • We need the tool to be easier to code logic similar like the programming languages we use
  • Creating a CICD pipeline is hard
  • having a single state file is a disadvantage, terraform runs slow if it's not running in the same network where the state file is
Terraform is the de-factor tool to provision infrastructure in an automated way, there are plenty of documentation and examples of people using the tool.
Terraform framework can be considered complicated to write efficient code, especially if you are doing some more complex use cases.
Creating efficient CICD pipelines is quiet challenge , I believe Terraform future will be replaced by Kubernetes operators.
July 12, 2021

Terraform Review

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Terraform is currently being used to deploy infrastructure to GCP. We are mindful of the fact that some components might need other cloud providers and as Terraform is a cross-platform tool it is easier to manage the infrastructure with Terraform. It helps to iterate quickly.
  • Supports a lot of other infrastructure providers like AWS, GCP, Datadog.
  • It provides the building blocks for quite a few resources
  • Appreciate adding the Terraform graph command
  • The command Terraform plan can be more sophisticated.
  • The language can be difficult for novice users
  • It is quite difficult to do major upgrades without breaking something
Terraform is amazing when you have a cloud environment. You can spend time designing the config files but you can save a lot of time when you have to deploy the same environment multiple times. For experimental cases, Terraform can be easily used to spin up environments and easily destroy them.
Guillermo Buritica Tobon | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Terraform across multiple clients to track and maintain infrastructure as a code, Using Terraform help us to keep the tracking of the systems and improve the time to market, We use Terraform for deploy similar environments for development, staging and productions.
  • Developed in Go is really efficient and fast
  • Use a really simple language easy to learn
  • The modular system is the state of the art in development
  • The need to keep one standard between versions
  • [I feel] The migration tool require improvement when you upgrade from one version to another
  • Import the infrastructure into the config require more work
When you need to deploy infrastructure and keep a track of your job. Use Terraform for keep your infrastructure make easy to find human errors and keep the history of changes in git or any repository if you use Terraform with your CICD tool you are in the state of the art in infrastructure management .
February 15, 2021

Terraform Review

Ben Carter | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Terraform to deploy our infrastructure into AWS at an enterprise level. We support more than 700 developers across different brands and businesses with a small team. That means we had to establish a baseline standard for how we work, and then provide a common language and the tooling teams at the edge necessary to meet the needs of the individual brands (but without the unnecessary overhead expenses and production logjams).
  • Terraform makes cloud state management much easier than natives tools supplied with the service providers.
  • If you opt for the business edition, you can get a private module registry. This allows for best practices modules to be distributed across the company and allows for more re-usability.
  • The providers do a fantastic job staying up to date on the latest changes from the Cloud providers features updates. This makes taking advantage of the new features launched not a problem.
  • The language itself is readable and has had upgrades recently to make it more powerful for repeatable patterns.
  • 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.
Terraform has a strong community and is well-known DSL in the DevOps space, finding talent that leverage Terraform has continued to grow. They are a good option for mid to larger organizations that want to manage their infrastructure with maturity.

If you are leveraging AWS and have a team already comfortable with their offerings like Cloud Formation, I would choose to stay or start in the AWS eco-system.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Terraform is currently being used to provision our resources in the cloud. This is by far the best way to achieve full automation when migrating to the cloud and is great a working with AWS.
  • AWS Resource Provisioning: Terraform is great at provisioning resources within AWS. Sometimes, there are some tricky bits when it interacts with the AWS API, but those are typically API limitations with AWS and not reflective of Terraform's abilities.
  • State: Since using Terraform, I have not had any issue managing resource state using Terraform. It's a little tricky to set up remote state, but once implemented it's smooth sailing from then on in my experience.
  • Extensibility: Terraform has really been written as a gateway to bigger and better things. It's so easy to extend terraform with your own modules, to submit PRs with new functionality, and it integrates well with other tooling.
  • Upgrades: It's really hard to do major upgrades of terraform without breaking something. The upgrade from 11 to 12 has been pretty brutal.
  • Setting up remote state: Despite pretty good documentation, setting up remote state initially is pretty tricky and in my experience required a little of the "you have to run it this way once, then create this thing, then run it again" kind of workflows which are always a little painful
Terraform is well suited for provisioning any kind of system in my opinion. You can use it for cloud resources, but you can also use it for on-prem stuff as well (though the latter may be a little more difficult).
August 15, 2017

Why I used Terraform

Murugan Mani | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It's a great IaC to develop your private/public cloud environment. It almost covers major devops tools and other provisioners which help to plan the complete pipeline in one framework. It's lightweight and easy to start the basic blocks and integrate. Features like backend and iterations are great options to maximize the scale of infrastructure.
  • Orchestration provision support
  • State backend support like swift
  • Debug support
  • Local testing
  • Terraform is a well contributed open source project but support is average
  • Coverage of various tools is great where only important functionalities were covered like in Chef
  • It provides the automation from various pieces but running the same from scripts/other external inputs would be great
  • Interpolations are supported but not well enough
  • Secret management is poor and needs support on special characters
February 15, 2017

DevOps person

Deepshikha Gandhi | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Terraform is being used by our DevOps team to manage mainly our AWS infrastructure as code. It enables us to collaborate, automate and share pieces of our cloud infrastructure amongst and across teams. Terraform enables us to maintain reproducible, shareable and version-controlled infrastructure and deployments as compared to the older methodology of owning and configuring machines by hand.
  • Ability to "plan" and "apply" configs. Plans show us what changes will take place - so it's like a no-op safe mode dry-run. Apply actually executes the changes.
  • Terraform has providers for most major infrastructure providers like AWS, VMWare, OpenStack
  • Ability to use the same code/configs to provision different environments - QA, staging and production
  • Ability to create modules and share them between services
  • Terraform uses it's own DSL called the Hashicorp Configuration Language which takes some getting used to.
  • Terraform state files store secrets in plain text which is a bad idea when you push it to version-control.
  • Multiple teammates working simultaneously on a single state file is a problem. It's easy to forget to push or pull the latest state. Also version control systems like Git don't have a way of locking a file.
If you have environments that change a lot and you need ephemeral systems on the fly to test your code releases, Terraform is the tool for you. Maintaining different environments like staging and QA before releasing to production is also easy as you can use the same code and configs for all three. Terraform also makes it easy to destroy these environments when they become obsolete.
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