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…
HashiCorp Terraform - make IT boring again (in a good way...)
Terraform - Codify your infrastructure
The main reason for using Terraform is to allow us to reliably …
The de facto tool for provisioning infrastructure today
Cloud Engineer review of Terraform
Terraform - Best Cloud-agnostic Infrastructure Provisioning Tool.
Terraform Review
Really good tool for Infrastructure
Terraform for Automation
Terraform Review
Terraform Review
Terraform is the Perfect Tool for Building Infrastructure as Code
Infrastructure as code, finally!
Infrastructure Configured
A great automation tool for everyone
Makes your environment more reliable and easily replicable.
Reviewer Pros & Cons
Pricing
Open Source
$0
Team & Governance
$20/user
Enterprise
Contact sales team
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Product Demos
Infrastructure Pipelines with Terraform Cloud
Product Details
- About
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is HashiCorp Terraform?
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
HashiCorp Terraform Competitors
HashiCorp Terraform Technical Details
Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
---|---|
Operating Systems | Unspecified |
Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
Comparisons
Compare with
Reviews and Ratings
(123)Community Insights
- Pros
- Cons
- Recommendations
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
(1-5 of 5)- 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.
- 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.
- Using code, we are able to build and deploy cloud resources faster and more consistently than producing the same resources in the console manually.
- For applications that share architectures, we can reuse code to expedite development. We can also do the same with modules that are shared across the organization.
- By defining all of our resources as code, we can deploy complete environments with "batteries included." For example, we can use code that spins up servers in a cloud provider and at the same time, creates monitors with in our monitoring provider. Likewise, when the servers are decommissioned, the monitors are decommed along with them. In the past, the creation and decom of the monitors would have been a disjointed, manual step. With Terraform we get it all with one "terraform apply."
Compared to CloudFormation, the first benefit that Terraform has is the the code format. That is, CloudFormation is more of a document in YAML or JSON while Terraform is more code-like in structure. This makes it more similar to other programming languages that engineers may be familiar with. In fact, the times that I've worked with CloudFormation, I've used other code (Python with the Troposphere library) to generate the CloudFormation YAML.
Terraform also lends itself to breaking out code into smaller pieces. That is, for a single project, different parts of it can be represented in different files. For example, all the EC2 resources in one file and all the RDS resources in another file, and so on. With CloudFormation, all resources are represented in one file. For large projects this can become unwieldy when trying to track down specific resources. For versioned code (and shouldn't all code be versioned?) tracking changes may also become difficult with one, monolithic file.
Lastly, I will mention state management. I _do_ appreciate that CloudFormation manages state for the user without question; it's one less thing to worry about. However, I appreciate the fact that Terraform gives options for storing state and the ability to examine it outside of the resource implementation process. Honestly, this is a minor detail but sometimes it comes in handy.
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.
Infrastructure as code, finally!
- 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.
- Scaling our infrastructure has become much easier, leading to less downtime.
- Less buggy deployments due to bad config changes, also leading to less downtime.
- Chef
Infrastructure Configured
- 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.
- Prevents mistakes compared to deploying directly on live environment.
- Configuration changes are reviewed before changes are made (using Git of course).
A great automation tool for everyone
- 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.
- Terraform has increased our time to market in releasing new software.
- Terraform has decreased defects in our operating environment.
- Terraform has improved our ability to plan for labor resources by creating a common skill set.
Using Terraform to Automate Your Future
- 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