HashiCorp Terraform Reviews

I use the solution in my company to create services over cloud platforms. I have used HashiCorp Terraform for GCP, Azure, and AWS to create resources. With HashiCorp Terraform, it is easy to manage resources in a single file.

The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the modules it offers. One can find Terraform modules via Google.

The versions of Terraform providers are an area of concern where improvements are required. If a person wants to use the modules created by someone else a few years ago, then there is a need to change all the resources or use the version of the product in which the modules were created. The modules are suitable only for the particular provider version on which they were created. The product should be made more dynamic in nature.

I have been using HashiCorp Terraform for five years. I am a customer of the product.

It is a stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

I have experience with AWS CloudFormation.

The product's initial setup phase was easy.

The solution is deployed on the cloud or an on-premises model.

The solution can be deployed in five people if the person is an expert in the use of searching for information on Google.

It is an open-source product.

A scenario where the product improved our company's deployment process stems from an incident where I was working for one of our organization's clients where we had to set up a complete application offering for them. There were no disaster recovery options available due to cost-related issues. Whenever there is any disaster, my company pops up a particular DR environment, after which the application can go live from such an environment. My company lost all the resources due to the lack of a DR environment. Using HashiCorp Terraform, my company created state files in which we changed the reasons and created a complete infrastructure in a single go. With the help of HashiCorp Terraform, it took my company only 13 or 14 minutes to ensure that the application went live from our end.

The product's state file management feature greatly enhances our company's infrastructure. In our company, it is great that the tool allows us to manage the state file over the cloud or any bucket offered under Azure or Amazon S3's services, and the fact that we can directly fetch the data with the ID from the state file, making it an area that becomes easy to manage for users. For reusability, it is easy.

I recommend the product to those who plan to use it. Whenever people want to create or publish a module, we need to specify the version for HashiCorp Terraform and providers. Whenever someone wants to use a modular after a few years since it was created, such a person will be able to easily understand the version of HashiCorp Terraform to be deployed since searching for the version can be time-consuming.

I rate the overall tool a nine out of ten.

Terraform is our main infrastructure as code at the bank. Our entire deployment site and the AWS solution are based on Terraform. We use EBridge and the Dochub solution on the Bitbucket pipeline. Terraform runs on a container in the Bitbucket pipeline, but to create my entire cloud solution, I use EBridge.

Terraform centralizes all our applications and it’s the best way to do it. When you work with the container and the EC2 clusters, you need to create each service manually. Terraform allows you to create a lot of them at once and check if they are being created correctly. It is a huge timesaver.

I find almost all the features valuable. It is the customization of Terraform's modules that I find most valuable.

Terraform could create more examples in the documentation. It is an enterprise/free solution, and you have to do a lot to customize the tools. A huge example I faced before that drove me nuts was when I created an entire data lake using Terraform. A DMS solution using Oracle didn't read some options in AWS on the Terraform module. I opened a ticket to support, asking, "Could you improve this module, only adding these features as variables?" After four months, my ticket was closed by a bot because support was not looking for it. I don't know if there were many issues or tickets, but support should listen to the Terraform community better and make adjustments to their tools.

I've been using HashiCorp Terraform since 2017.

Terraform is stable. I don't use Terraform Cloud, though they offered it to me previously. Using other clouds, we don't face many issues or instability in our ecosystem. The only issue or instability I have faced was because the AWS cloud was unstable, so Terraform got timed out and could not finish the task, trying again and again and being stalled for two hours. That is the only issue I remember because we use the EBridge environment. We try to compensate for Terraform's instability and make it viable using other platforms. Using Terraform's cloud solution brings more stability, but for what we are using right now, Terraform only breaks if we make a mistake in the code.

Terraform is hugely scalable. If I have everything in place, you can create an entire environment, like a data lake, in one simple deployment. But it is complex to scale. You will face some limitations if you try to work with multiple servers or accounts. Terraform works similarly to a FIFO context, but you must wait a long time to create the entire deployment before going to the next account. If deployment on one account fails, you cannot proceed to the next one because Terraform's main focus is on the security of the infrastructure. My entire squad of four uses Terraform because we centralized the DevOps for Terraform. We are planning to expand this tool to our entire development team. We will have at least 15 to 30 developers using the tool in the future.

Their customer support is the worst. I opened a ticket, and I never got an answer, and the community does not listen to the most common issues. But I understand why I was left out because I asked a hugely specific question about a little bug in the code. My experience was not the best, but I no longer need to ask them because I make my own workarounds. Besides, we don't face issues that require us to talk to support.

The customer should receive an answer regardless of the question. Even answers like, "This isn't a feature," "We can't do this right now," or "This isn't the roadmap."

Neutral

I compare Terraform with Ansible. I work with multiple servers in Ansible in a FIFO method. You have a list of servers you apply one after the other. But you can work with those servers in parallel, even if one server fails to deploy. In Terraform, you must finish deployment on each account before going to the next one.

When I joined my current company, they were already using Terraform, and we had to create the environment on AWS manually. We are not using any IaC tools.

The initial setup was complex. You need to understand what you want to do exactly. You are a child in a playground with many toys to play with, and you can create anything you want. But if you pick up the wrong "toy," you can hurt yourself and the environment. Using the wrong module can bring a huge cost to your infrastructure, and it won't perform as well as you initially expected. Initial setup is more difficult to start if you have some infrastructure completed.

If you are setting up from the start with baby steps, it is a little hard to understand the documentation, though it makes the setup look much simpler. You need some knowledge to understand how Terraform can apply to your environment. After that, it's easier. And just like riding a bike, you never forget.

The time taken to deploy the solution depends on what you are creating. For example, if I create a DMS instance for my data lake, it takes 15 minutes to deploy. If I'm creating a different data lake on the Athena database, it takes exactly 23 seconds to create. A DMS takes much more time, but not more than half an hour.

While deploying Terraform, we checked the Terraform statement on AWS. Each account has its own statement. We checked the difference between statements, made a Terraform image, made a plan, and checked the plan to see if it was correct and applied.

I did the deployment myself, looking at the documentation.

We use the free platform using Dochub. Terraform is a little expensive. In a basic scenario, the price is too high to use such a complex tool in the long term. As a small company starting to use Terraform, the price is too high, so I recommend the free solution. If you are a huge company with a huge environment and infrastructure, the price will seem cheaper because you can control your entire infrastructure using Terraform. The solution then pays for itself. Choosing the paid version depends on the size of the company and your team's expertise.

Terraform licenses are per account.

We currently use a statement for replication, trying to embed Terraform into our applications, but that's a new feature. We are applying some other features, for example, to check for vulnerabilities on your first code or to scan if you have hard-coded passwords, but we have not found anyone to help with these use cases. One of my co-workers is certified on Terraform, and they bring similar solutions also being used on Terraform for scanning. For myself, I want them to make that code work on as many accounts as possible. The same code must work on our deployment, homologation/staging, and production accounts. These are the three environments the code needs to work in. We tried making this a few months ago.

When deploying the solution, I did it by myself, looking at their documentation. Their documentation is good and bad. Their documentation is good because it gives a huge amount of information for several different possibilities, but it's bad because the documentation does not have a lot of real-life examples. Terraform prefers documentation as much as hard-coded information. For example, you might be using a certain string to do something, but in reality, you can do that in many other ways, and the documentation won't show all of those. You need to do trial and error or take a course with the Hashicorp organization to understand the different ways you can do something or use the platform.

I rate Terraform a seven out of ten because of its complexity.

A primary use case of Terraform is for deploying a VM on a cloud using Terraform script. If I then want to deploy a third-party toolset, a solution such as Aviatrix can create an overlay on top of each of the cloud providers and you can connect the clouds together. I'm a solutions architect and we are customers of HashiCorp. 

The solution has made a huge difference to us because the automation it provides has given us improved cost efficiency, security and saved many man-hours. It's created once and then that's pretty much it. When you next want to deploy something, you run it and it deploys. 

Terraform removes the manual process; you run it for a specific purpose, destroy it when you're done, and it removes all the associated components. The other good feature is that Terraform is idempotent; if something is already out there, it's not going to try to duplicate another installation of that environment.

One of the other major features of terraform is in its ability to act as a Disaster Recovery tool. Since terraform is an Infrastructure-As-A-Service tool, it can be used as part of the rest of the DR toolset to restore affected infrastructure to its original state without any variation. 

The Terraform manifests can be stored in a version control repository separate from the application code base and can be a single source of truth for an organization's infrastructure. The automation and the efficiency that Terraform brings to the SDLC lifecycle adds to the overall integrity of the infrastructure and provides a value added to the DevSecOps workflow.   

I've noticed that although Terraform is very good at deploying, it lacks in running script. For example, if you wanted to run multiple deployments such as a VM, and then install different softwares and create a full-blown infrastructure within that virtual machine, Terraform would probably lack certain features. I don't think it's very robust in running scripts or going from one sequence to another. You're likely to end up running a huge Terraform code base, where you'd probably get lost in terms of knowing where things are coming from and where they're going. 

I've been using this solution for two years. 

The solution is stable without too many bugs. If we're deploying on top of a current deployment, there can be some issues and that could be improved. If you need a fully idempotent solution, you deploy your infrastructure without touching any existing infrastructure. Unfortunately, Terraform fails when it finds an existing infrastructure and things become complicated. In terms of stability, this is probably one of the biggest deficiencies of Terraform. 

HashiCorp provides very good documentation so we haven't needed to contact technical support. They also have GitHub repository against each of those tutorials, so we can actually clone and tweak those according to our needs. There's also a large open-source community out there and a lot of blogs that complement the documentation. 

Deployment is just about downloading the plug-in. To run it requires each of the cloud environments on the CLI tool downloaded so that they both work together with all the credentials in place so that it can connect to each of the clouds. We are a small organization and still experimenting with Terraform so we only have one dedicated person helping out with the solution. That said, all of the team members are more or less skilled with Terraform.

We're definitely seeing cost savings from a man-hour point of view but I can't quantify it. 

We are using the free version of Terraform. Terraform Cloud has some kind of pricing and enterprise-level model which we haven't moved to yet. I think  Terraform has a pretty reasonable pricing structure. It allows the open-source community to use it as they please, so I'm pretty happy about it.

AWS has a code solution called CloudFormation which I think is a little slower than Terraform although I think CloudFormation is probably a bit more secure and foolproof.

This is a solid product and one of the leaders in this space. Terraform is used across the board as an Infrastructure-as-Code solution. 

There could be some improvements so I rate this solution eight out of 10. 

My company uses HashiCorp Terraform for cloud infrastructure provisioning. HashiCorp Terraform is the only IaC tool we use in our company.

The most valuable features of the solution are its simplicity of HCL language, its compatibility with multiple cloud providers, and its modules like the open source modules available, especially considering the fact that I work mainly on AWS. I believe that HashiCorp Terraform is one of the best products available in the market for my company's use cases. HashiCorp Terraform is also a feasible solution in terms of its availability of cloud resources.

I know a UI tool is available in the licensed version of HashiCorp Terraform. From a user's perspective, it would be great if a UI tool is made available in the open source version as well, but I don't think it may be introduced because of the high costs for it announced by HashiCorp in its licensed version.

HashiCorp Terraform can improve backward compatibility. From users' perspective, migration from one version to another is okay. The migration from an older version to a newer version is a big challenge in HashiCorp Terraform. We tried to fix the migration issues multiple times at our end and saw that some will not be compatible sometimes while, at times, certain aspects will be compatible with the new version.

I have been using HashiCorp Terraform for four years. I use HashiCorp Terraform v0.12 or v0.13. I use the open-source version of the tool for my company's internal usage.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

My organization has around 30 to 40 users of the solution.

The simplicity or complexity of the initial setup depends on the number of accounts involved in the setup phase on the cloud, along with the resources to be managed. Based on my experience, one won't find HashiCorp Terraform's setup difficult if the configuration and management are in place.

The solution is deployed on the public cloud. I know people who use the solution on private and hybrid clouds.

For those users with their infrastructure on the cloud, I would say that Terraform is a tool they can use immediately, even though other tools like Ansible are in the market. At some point, one may feel that Ansible lacks efficiency in a cloud infrastructure, which is a difficulty one may face when using Terraform in a bigger infrastructure. I would say that the combination of Ansible and Terraform is the best.

When following complex methods, Ansible is the best option. If you do too much configuration on the standalone file, then if not today, then tomorrow you might be stranded in a situation where you might not be able to edit or modify the configuration, especially when some improvements related to certain features have to be included in the product or your product's existing portal. It will be very tough to deal with, especially when it will be a single file with thousands of clients, making it a tough job to search. So you need to make sure that code reusability is properly using in your terraform code base.

I rate HashiCorp Terraform a nine out of ten.

We use HashiCorp Terraform for Infrastructure as Code (IaC).

The most valuable feature of HashiCorp Terraform is the custom modules. The custom modules are built for each piece, like network and security, based on how the customers are. Then, we can tie them together, centralize them easily, and build them.

HashiCorp Terraform state management could be improved to be used efficiently with multi-users. Even though there are logs, there are always issues I've seen with people manipulating the TerraForm state. We cannot work efficiently with the solution if the state is incorrect. Due to certain reasons, if I have to change some piece of some resource, I cannot change it. I have to destroy the whole thing and then build a new one.

I have been using HashiCorp Terraform for three years.

HashiCorp Terraform is a stable solution. I rate HashiCorp Terraform an eight or nine out of ten for stability.

Around 20 users are using HashiCorp Terraform in our organization.

I rate HashiCorp Terraform an eight or nine out of ten for scalability.

HashiCorp Terraform's initial setup is simple. Especially with TerraForm Cloud, you don't have to do anything since it's a SaaS platform. Also, TerraForm Enterprise is easy to install.

HashiCorp Terraform's deployment is very easy and doesn't take much time.

We have seen a return on investment with HashiCorp Terraform.

HashiCorp Terraform's pricing depends on the way people use it. Not everyone uses the solution the way HashiCorp recommends to use it. HashiCorp Terraform goes by workspaces, and workspaces are more expensive than nodes. The nodes are cheaper.

People implement the solution in different ways. So you can use the solution with less money and make it cheaper, but that's not the recommended way. If you use the solution according to the recommended way by HashiCorp, it is more expensive.

I am using the latest version of HashiCorp Terraform.

I recommend users build the framework and the modules correctly right from the beginning. Then, build the workspace as recommended by HashiCorp. According to HashiCorp's recommendation, one workspace should exist per application or environment. That's how people need to build it.

Then, modularize everything and make custom modules for the organizations. Especially things that stay out of the application, like security, network, and compute, should be in separate modules. Later, they can be brought into the application.

Overall, I rate HashiCorp Terraform an eight out of ten.

We use the solution for three things. Firstly, to automate the infrastructure, like enabling Logpush to Datadog. Secondly, for Cloudflare AWS and Insight AWS. Thirdly, we use Terraform to create infrastructure.

It is one of the best things because now we have everything automated with Terraform. We didn't have an outage for the last three years because everything is written in a code, and every change we have made is recorded. If we didn't have a tool like Terraform, it would be extremely complex to achieve this level of maturity with infrastructure.

The state file is the most valuable feature because it helps one know what exactly one has.

The solution is complex when we use it for a loop. This is a problem, not because of the language itself, but because of how the infrastructure generally works. It's different from Python.

I have been using the solution for three and a half years.

It is a stable solution. I rate it nine out of ten.

The solution is not very scalable. I rate it six out of ten.

The initial setup is complex.

We have seen ROI with the tool's use. 

I plan to use the solution more in the future. I recommend people to use it as it is the best tool in the market at the moment to create infrastructure anywhere.

I rate it ten out of ten.

We use Terraform to create infrastructure. We get the name of the resource provider, and the Terraform script is returned in HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL). 

We can find readily available code from the HashiCorp community to create a virtual machine or Kubernetes service cluster. We take that code, provide the resource provider name, and run the script using Terraform commands to create the infrastructure

We currently use Terraform in our Azure pipelines in the cloud. Our team has 10 developers, and we will increase our usage as the team grows. 

We frequently need to create and replicate infrastructure from various environments like dev and QA. The QA resources need to be identical to those in the dev environment. With a Terraform script, we can replicate the same 50 in the dev environment to the testing environment. This is tedious to do manually, and Terraform speeds up the process. 

Infrastructure replication is Terraform's most valuable feature. 

Terraform should also support YAML language, which is more user-friendly than HCL. They should also add a GUI, so you don't need to memorize all the commands. A GUI would enable us to do everything with a click of a button. 

I have been using Terraform for the last three years.

I rate Terraform seven out of 10 for stability.

I rate Terraform eight out of 10 for scalability.`

I rate HashiCorp seven out of 10 for technical support.

Neutral

I rate Terraform eight out of 10 for ease of setup. 

Terraform is an open-source solution.

I rate HashiCorp Terraform seven out of 10. It's interesting to see how the infrastructure is created rather than creating it manually.

We use this solution to manage our resources in a fully automatic way. I'm a senior Azure DevOps engineer and we are users of Terraform. 

I like the Centrix feature which gives us the ability to create loops. I also like that modules can be reused extremely easily. This is a super robust solution and I would recommend it to anyone. It has a great user interface and integrates well.

It would be helpful for us if the open source tech support was a little better. 

I've been using this solution for four years. 

The solution is stable.

The solution is highly scalable.

We use the free open-source version of Terraform so it can take time to resolve problems. The issues are generally minor, so it's not a big deal. 

Neutral

The deployment can take anywhere from 10 minutes to two hours. 

I rate this solution ten out of ten.