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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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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.
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
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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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!
- 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
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Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- 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
June 23, 2022
Terraform - Codify your infrastructure
- 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
April 26, 2022
The de facto tool for provisioning infrastructure today
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- 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
September 28, 2021
Cloud Engineer review of Terraform
- Provides detailed examples with documentation
- Allows public modules to be easily used for simple coding
- Easy setup and deployment to start writing Terraform
- Finding what resources and services are created by Terraform within a cloud environment - you can use tags but it is not as easy as it can be.
- Provide direction on proper coding and best practices of how to setup the templates/modules.
- 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.
July 12, 2021
Terraform Review
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- 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
June 19, 2021
Really good tool for Infrastructure
- 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
February 20, 2021
Terraform for Automation
- Automation
- Internal dependency resolution
- Management is easy
- Create code while doing import.
- More RBAC
- Some hash to manage passwords in CLI
February 15, 2021
Terraform Review
- 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.
February 12, 2021
Terraform Review
- 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.
- 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.
January 13, 2020
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.
December 17, 2019
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.
September 18, 2019
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.
August 20, 2019
Makes your environment more reliable and easily replicable.
- 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.
August 08, 2019
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
May 17, 2019
Terraform for the win
- 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.
January 30, 2019
Terraform: a great infrastructure as a code tool
- 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.
August 15, 2017
Why I used Terraform
- Orchestration provision support
- State backend support like swift
- Debug support
- Local testing
April 26, 2017
Infrastructure as Code Done Right!
- 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.
April 14, 2017
Terraform Improved our World
- 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.
April 12, 2017
Terraform - Automate your company's IT
- 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.
February 15, 2017
DevOps person
- 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.
January 16, 2017
Shape your (virtual) world with Terraform
- 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.
December 15, 2016
Advantages of Terraform
- Easy to build cross cloud providers infrastructure
- Reusable stack resources by using remote state
- N/A