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Terraform Reviews

63 Ratings
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Score 9.1 out of 100

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Reviews (1-22 of 22)

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April 27, 2021

Terraform - Codify your infrastructure

Fraser Clark | TrustRadius Reviewer
Fraser Clark
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • Deploy infrastructure quickly & reliably
  • Repeatability thanks to use of modules
  • Dry runs thanks to the plan command
  • A new language to learn
  • Documentation, specifically examples are often complex and do not explain things very well
  • No rollback capability built in, must be done through version control
Read Fraser Clark's full review
February 15, 2021

Terraform Review

Ben Carter | TrustRadius Reviewer
Ben Carter
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • 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.
Read Ben Carter's full review
February 12, 2021

Terraform Review

Jude Allred | TrustRadius Reviewer
Jude Allred
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • Terraform has a large ecosystem of modules for a variety of providers
  • For many services, Terraform provides strong default configurations
  • Terraform is completely and totally superior to using CloudFormation directly
  • 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.
Read Jude Allred's full review
February 12, 2021

Terraform - Best Cloud-agnostic Infrastructure Provisioning Tool.

Abdullah Khawer | TrustRadius Reviewer
Abdullah Khawer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • Terraform is cloud agnostic. Just select the suitable provider for the cloud and it will do the job.
  • Templating is possible to make the Terraform templates reusable.
  • Variables can be created to make the templates generic so that it can be reused for different environments or resources.
  • Terraform doesn't have a GUI which would have made its use a lot easier.
  • There is no auto-rollback feature upon failure.
  • Tracking and visibility can be improved as using Terraform plan to find out what is already created via Terraform by using Terraform state is a bit harder.
Read Abdullah Khawer's full review
February 11, 2021

Terraform: How to take back control of your infrastructure

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Verified User
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • Reproducible infrastructure
  • Reliable Infrastructure diffs
  • History of infrastructure changes
  • Easy Rollbacks
  • Documentation
  • Verbose
  • Complex Domain Specific Language (Documented well though)
  • Learning Curve
Read this authenticated review
March 31, 2020

Terraform is the Perfect Tool for Building Infrastructure as Code

Michael Jenkins | TrustRadius Reviewer
Michael Jenkins
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • Terraform does a great job of making cloud resources available as code. Essentially, it provides building blocks for the resources available in the cloud.
  • I use the open source version of Terraform and I appreciate the user experience at the command line. Using the switches available, the CLI lends itself to a flow of formatting and validating code before a plan is developed, reviewed, and applied.
  • Managing the state of the resources created with code is tough but Terraform does a good job of this by providing several ways to manage state. My team uses the bucket approach but I have seen teams use object databases and shared files as well. Each approach comes with its pros and cons but at least there are options.
  • During the plan phase, I appreciate that Terraform shows the changes that are about to be applied to resources that already exist. This gives engineers insight into the changes they're about to make, particularly if the changes are not what they expected.
  • I like Terraforms "desired state" approach to IaC, but sometimes I wish the code was a bit more programmatic. Adding counts and "for_each" statements is nice for creating multiple instances of the same resources. But this approach can be difficult to understand for engineers that come from a programming background. A more expressive approach to looping and other coding styles would be nice.
  • A rollback feature would be a welcome addition to Terraform. At the time I'm writing this, when Terraform encounters an error, it stops on the step where the error is encountered and any resources previously created are left in place. While this is desired in most cases, and option for rolling back those resources would provide functionality similar to other IaC tools.
  • Regarding plan output, a minimized report would be appreciated. Currently I have wrappers around the "terraform plan" command that limit the output to key changes. It would be great if there were switches that built this into the tool.
Read Michael Jenkins's full review
December 17, 2019

Infrastructure Configured

Ronak Shah | TrustRadius Reviewer
Ronak Shah
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • Permissions.
  • Review plan before deployment.
  • Explaining what needs to be used for what for novice AWS users.
  • Very finicky with formatting. Should include formatting implicitly.
Read Ronak Shah's full review
January 13, 2020

Infrastructure as code, finally!

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Verified User
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • Support/integration with many infrastructure providers including AWS, Google Cloud, Datadog, Gitlab, Heroku, SignalFX.
  • A neat thing about infrastructure as code is that it solves an age-old problem of infrastructure: knowing the configuration of everything about the network and services is as easy as reading a formatted config file.
  • Terraform's integration with different providers hasn't matured yet, so the API keeps changing or is buggy.
  • Also, because Terraform is relatively new, documentation/books/blogs are hard to come by, and it's hard to hire DevOps engineers who are familiar with it.
Read this authenticated review
September 18, 2019

A great automation tool for everyone

Jeffrey Severance | TrustRadius Reviewer
Jeffrey Severance
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • Deploy infrastructure as code quickly. It is easy to get the environment installed and develop quickly.
  • The modular approach of terraform encourages collaboration and consistency. We can share and reuse functionality across our deployments.
  • Terraform provides modelling of the relationships between constructs in it. This is accomplished using the terraform graph command.
  • The errors generated by the tool in some cases are not detailed enough when debugging.
  • Terraform state is key and if corrupted it can't be restored.
  • Everything must be converted to a string before it can be compared in version 11.
Read Jeffrey Severance's full review
August 19, 2019

Makes your environment more reliable and easily replicable.

Erlon Sousa Pinheiro | TrustRadius Reviewer
Erlon Sousa Pinheiro
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • The Terraform files would be considered as documentation since our entire environment is described there.
  • Terraform will manage the state of your environment, that means, if something is not in conformity, it will try to fix keeping as close as possible of the desired state.
  • With Terraform, you can manage different cloud environments at the same configuration files. That is really useful when you need to handle with different cloud providers.
  • The way Terraform manages variables is a bit annoying. Sometimes we need to declare the same variable in more the one file. So far, this doesn't make sense for me.
  • Due to the speed, as new AWS products are released, if we want to work with something new, we need to wait for a new version with this new feature be released.
  • As with most DevOps tools, Terraform has its own DSL language and will require time to learn the product for you feel confident in its usage.
Read Erlon Sousa Pinheiro's full review
May 16, 2019

Terraform for the win

David Tanner | TrustRadius Reviewer
David Tanner
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • Repeatable deployments between environments.
  • Changes to environments can be seen before making real changes.
  • It integrates well with each of our providers.
  • Terraform could be expanded to provide common programming functionality.
  • Sometimes the documentation isn't completely clear on what fields mean or do.
  • It would be nice to have rollback capability.
Read David Tanner's full review
August 08, 2019

Using Terraform to Automate Your Future

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Verified User
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • 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
Read this authenticated review
January 30, 2019

Terraform: a great infrastructure as a code tool

Dhruba Jyoti Nag | TrustRadius Reviewer
Dhruba Jyoti Nag
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • Terraform is a premier IAAS tool.
  • It provides modularization and planning features.
  • It is platform and language agnostic.
  • It is open source and thus has strong community support.
  • Terraform is vulnerable when it comes to error handling.
  • Often when a terraform job is terminated midway, it leads to an inconsistent state of the deployed resources which needs manual cleanup.
  • Terraform is an open source tool and has a related learning curve.
Read Dhruba Jyoti Nag's full review
December 18, 2018

Terraform: Best in Class SaaS Configuration Management

Stephen Groat | TrustRadius Reviewer
Stephen Groat
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • Multiple providers that allow for configuration of multiple services in the same codeset
  • Great community support
  • Excellent open source support
  • Extremely expensive enterprise services that can be essential for less technical companies
  • Large overhead and learning curve for initial deployment
  • Maintenance overhead can be high, product is constantly changing and requires significant management
Read Stephen Groat's full review
August 15, 2017

Why I used Terraform

Murugan Mani | TrustRadius Reviewer
Murugan Mani
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • Orchestration provision support
  • State backend support like swift
  • Debug support
  • Local testing
Read Murugan Mani's full review
January 16, 2017

Shape your (virtual) world with Terraform

Charles Anderson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Charles Anderson
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • I find the HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) superior to raw JSON used by Cloud Formation.
  • Being open-source is a plus not just for "philosophical" reasons, but it also provide rapid support when new products are announced from vendors like Amazon.
  • The fact that it's free and open-source means that it's easy to start evaluating Terraform (and most of the other tools from HashiCorp) without being pressured by sales people.
  • Until recently, there haven't been any books about Terraform. Although the online documentation for Terraform is pretty good, it's often nice to have a traditional book, especially when learning. Now, there are two books on the subject.
  • Terraform is rapidly evolving. Part of that is the nature of the space - vendors are always coming up with new offerings and API. But, some days I wish the targets would stop moving for a bit.
Read Charles Anderson's full review
April 26, 2017

Infrastructure as Code Done Right!

Aiman Najjar | TrustRadius Reviewer
Aiman Najjar
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • Great implementation of Infrastructure as Code concept.
  • Supports various cloud providers, including AWS, Azure and OpenStack
  • Encourages good design practices
  • Collaboration is made possible by using remote backend to store state files (such as S3)
  • Product is still maturing and there are some design limitation
  • Refactoring infrastructure code can sometimes become troublesome and unnecessarily require re-creating resources (such as when renaming resources)
  • Collaboration requires proper training or could result in dangerous outcome, engineers may easily overwrite remote state file or step on each other's toes. Collaboration process needs some improvement.
Read Aiman Najjar's full review
April 14, 2017

Terraform Improved our World

Kyle Rockman | TrustRadius Reviewer
Kyle Rockman
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • Configuration as Code in a modular reusable manner.
  • The plan apply life cycle is the best, it gives structure to what can sometimes be a scary process of modifying your infrastructure - even after it has aged or hasn't been touched in years.
  • Integrating with many outside services and providers keeps us from having to hack things together.
  • Integration with Hashicorp's Vault for secret management and temporary credentials makes giving out access a breeze.
  • It's a command-line tool and as such, some users in our organization are not comfortable with that. We ended up wrapping the tool with a UI to give the less skilled users access as well as layering on top a templating system to abstract away best practices and make things far simpler to configure.
Read Kyle Rockman's full review
February 15, 2017

DevOps person

Deepshikha Gandhi | TrustRadius Reviewer
Deepshikha Gandhi
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • 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.
Read Deepshikha Gandhi's full review
April 12, 2017

Terraform - Automate your company's IT

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Verified User
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • It helps make VM provisioning easier.
  • It helps integrate CICD software pipeline to provisioning, thereby reducing the time to quickly standup a server/service.
  • It helps make clustering of boxes easier.
  • Provisioning bare metal.
  • Replacing Chef as the automation/compliance software for enterprises.
  • Get away from that single state file dependency. If someone accidently deletes the state file or that file becomes corrupt, the entire environment state is lost and we have to rebuild the whole infrastructure.
Read this authenticated review

Terraform Scorecard Summary

Likelihood to Recommend (63)
9.1
Likelihood to Renew (1)
10.0
Usability (1)
8.0
Performance (6)
9.4
Support Rating (9)
6.9

What is 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 team members, treated as code, edited, reviewed, and versioned. It is available Open Source, and via Cloud and Self-Hosted editions.
Categories:  Configuration Management

Terraform Pricing

  • Does not have featureFree Trial Available?No
  • Has featureFree or Freemium Version Available?Yes
  • Does not have featurePremium Consulting/Integration Services Available?No
  • Entry-level set up fee?No
EditionPricing DetailsTerms
Free$0per month
Team & Governance$20per user/per month
BusinessContact sales team

Terraform Technical Details

Deployment Types:SaaS
Operating Systems: Unspecified
Mobile Application:No

Frequently Asked Questions

What is 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 team members, treated as code, edited, reviewed, and versioned. It is available Open Source, and via Cloud and Self-Hosted editions.

What is Terraform's best feature?

Reviewers rate Performance highest, with a score of 9.4.

Who uses Terraform?

The most common users of Terraform are from Mid-size Companies and the Computer Software industry.