Cloud Engineer review of Terraform
September 28, 2021

Cloud Engineer review of Terraform

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

Software Version

Terraform Cloud

Overall Satisfaction with Terraform, by HashiCorp

It is used by our Cloud Services team. The business problems it addresses are automation and repeatability for things like multi environment deployments or for deploying duplicate architecture for each customer that a client may have. Our organization deals with many clients every day and some want their cloud environments to be architected in Terraform in order to easily deploy to new accounts, cloud providers, or even to other regions within an account.

Pros

  • Provides detailed examples with documentation
  • Allows public modules to be easily used for simple coding
  • Easy setup and deployment to start writing Terraform

Cons

  • 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.
  • Public support
  • Reuse of modules and code
  • Simple and consistent method to deploy architecture to the cloud
  • Decrease time to failover to a disaster recovery region/environment to minutes versus hours
  • Decrease time to setup new environment from days to minutes/hours
  • Reduce the amount of time needed to deploy architecture by reusing code that we have developed internally along with using publicly available modules.
CloudFormation is only for AWS so if you're trying to deploy to another cloud provider then Terraform is your product. Terraform has lots of public support so you can find answers to questions by Googling. CloudFormation is easy to view the resources/services that are deployed using those stacks which is better than Terraform supplies but I don't think that outweighs the ease of learning and deploying that Terraform has. Also, with Terraform you can deploy easily to multiple environments with few commands, which CloudFormation can't do. Using a tool such as Runway allows you to setup deployments so they can be automated to multiple environments at a time.

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?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of HashiCorp Terraform go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy HashiCorp Terraform again?

Yes

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.

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