Infrastructure as code, finally!
January 13, 2020

Infrastructure as code, finally!

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

Overall Satisfaction with Terraform

We in the software engineering department use Terraform management of AWS and Datadog. Terraform allows us to store and set up host configuration, load balancers, Datadog monitors all as code that can be checked into version control. Terraform neatly abstracts away the details of AWS and Datadog and exposes a simple API, so it makes it possible for every single team, even those without much infrastructure experience, to help maintain the infrastructure. It is also a key component in our deployment process.
  • 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
Chef and Terraform are not apples to apples because Chef is more focused on config management, whereas Terraform is more focused on provisioning. However, I can say that where they do overlap in configuration management is that Terraform is the preferred tool because it has an immutable data model and so is much less prone to errors and hard-to-find bugs. Chef also requires a master server to maintain state, whereas Terraform does not.
Terraform has a robust and nascent community active in the Terraform forums and on GitHub. I haven't tried interacting with anyone there, but I heard from my co-workers they've found many solutions to their issues there. We also use Terraform Enterprise, provided by HashiCorp, and I have experienced first-class, professional, and timely support from them via email (but this depends on which plan you pay for).

Do you think HashiCorp Terraform delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with HashiCorp Terraform's feature set?

Yes

Did HashiCorp Terraform live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of HashiCorp Terraform go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy HashiCorp Terraform again?

Yes

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.