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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 …
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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

(1-25 of 25)
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Eric Mintz | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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.
Fraser Clark | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Terraform is useful in any scenario where infrastructure as code is needed, as long as their is a "provider" for what you wish to codify.
Terraform is well suited to any size of team thanks to the use of workspaces and proper use of version control will allow work on branches without upsetting anything in production.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is great for deploying relatively static architectures to new accounts or regions in the cloud. It can easily do other architectures but the best case is resources that are defined, the parameters can change but when you know what resources/services you need it's great. Less appropriate are cases where you will be dynamically changing resources or parameters on certain resources. It also might be difficult to write modules that use Lambda and things that have their own code base. This can be done but it's not as easy as simple tasks.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
If you want to stay cloud-agnostic and don't want to write up a lot of code for your infrastructure provisioning, then Terraform is the best tool among the other products. If you're going to use only one cloud and going to stick with it forever then you can go with that cloud's specific tool used for infrastructure provisioning.
July 12, 2021

Terraform Review

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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
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
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.
February 12, 2021

Terraform Review

Jude Allred | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Michael Jenkins | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I think Terraform is well suited for many use cases for Infrastructure as Code:
  • For long running resources, having a single source of truth for their desired configuration is handy, since that configuration can drift over time.
  • For short running or experimental cases, Terraform code can be used to quickly spin up environments before spinning them down just as quickly.
  • If a reference architecture is needed, Terraform code can be used to describe all the resources that make up a stack.
Terraform has plenty of functions and programming capabilities but it's not a general purpose programming language. I can see someone trying to do everything in Terraform but there are plenty of general purpose programming languages that are better suited for common tasks outside of building infrastructure as code.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Pretty much anytime your DevOps engineers are managing more than ten machines or when you want multiple teams not focused on DevOps to help own the infrastructure hosting their code. Popular opinion is that Terraform is not very secure, battle-tested, and leaking secrets happen easily on accident. So, Terraform is less ideal when you have to store lots of sensitive secrets that your company is legally required to guard lest it is the end of you. Think Fintech, health-tech.
December 17, 2019

Infrastructure Configured

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I would say Terraform should be used within even a single-user environment as it prevents costly mistakes if you review plan outputs. I would strongly recommend everyone managing their cloud environment to lock up the ability to make changes through the console and only allow changes to be deployed through configuration stored in the files.
Jeffrey Severance | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It works well for provisioning infrastructure. It works well when complimented by a version control system. It is also free and community driven. This leads to a constantly improving environment which fosters innovation within the product. The community makes it easier to find solutions to problems. This is widely used across the market place and by big companies such as Google, and Capital One.
Erlon Sousa Pinheiro | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Two scenarios I can describe Terraform as an amazing option are when you have a complex (or not) cloud environment which needs to be deployed and destroyed frequently in different regions. Using Terraform you can do that using just one command line. You'll spend some time designing the config files, but you'll save a huge amount of time every time you need to deploy this same environment. Furthermore, you can create those scripts parametrized, in a way that you can give a few parameters allowing some flexibility. The second case is when you have the same environment in different cloud providers. You can manage them using just one resource.
David Tanner | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Terraform is well suited to setting up infrastructure in different cloud providers. I have used it for AWS resources for several years, and really only run into minor snags. It is not an appropriate place to store sensitive values, but it can easily call out to system resources, like Node.JS or a Linux shell.
Dhruba Jyoti Nag | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Terraform is more versatile when compared to cloud formation. It is cloud-agnostic, so unlike cloud formation, it is able to deploy resources in cloud ecosystems other than AWS. The code can be modularized, hence there is ample scope of reuse. It can also be used to deploy apps written in various languages. In short, it makes deployment to cloud a breeze.
August 15, 2017

Why I used Terraform

Murugan Mani | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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
Aiman Najjar | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Infrastructure as Code: Best suited for cloud infrastructure but could work for data center infrastructure. Terraform is good for orchestrating infrastructure, not "configuring" it, e.g. even though you can use cloud-init to provision and install packages. For advanced configuration management, you will probably need a tool like Chef or Puppet
Kyle Rockman | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our experience switching from Salt Stack to Terraform has been so beneficial and the uptake has been far stronger by our users than it ever was with Salt Stack. I still think Terraform could do with a usability pass to reduce the learning curve and a UX pass to facilitate use by those who do not like command-line tools.
February 15, 2017

DevOps person

Deepshikha Gandhi | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Charles Anderson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Terraform is a great tool for building virtual infrastructures in clouds like Amazon and Google. If you are building a heterogenous infrastructure spanning multiple vendors, I don't know of any other single tool that can do that. Even in the case where you're just building AWS infrastructure, I prefer the HCL syntax of Terraform, and I dislike getting roped into using some of the Amazon tools.
December 15, 2016

Advantages of Terraform

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It's well suited if you are targeting to multi-cloud deployment. Terraform manages state via a json file. This file serves as the source of truth about what the actual environment contains. However, the problem is the inability of Terraform to uniquely identify resources that it creates.
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