HashiCorp Terraform Reviews

We deliver the platform as a service to businesses. For example, one request for a particular subscription could be in the business domain or non-business domain, whatever it may be, based on the demand, we deliver the customized subscription to them. For each service, we have different constraints. What needs to be delivered in the VNet of Azure, and what needs to be done externally.

The ARM template is very easy to work with, which is a big help to us. At the end of the day, there are a lot of tools that we explore like FollowMe and other solutions, which come in handy.

I personally say it's already simplified. I don't see many areas for improvement because Terraform employs a lot of skilled engineers that put their time and energy into providing a fantastic enterprise-level tool like this. There is not much more to simplify. There are already quite notable features in Terraform and we've already been provided with updates and other features. In short, there are many things which are already in place, so I don't think that we need anything more from Terraform.

I have been using this solution for over six months.

Personally, I haven't really experienced any significant instability issues with Terraform. Once or twice I've noticed log issues, but apart from that, I haven't really experienced any problems. Keep in mind, this is the first platform that we are building using Terraform, so we have yet to come across the version with the initial data. In the future, I may face heat and pressure when I'm doing that, but I am not really sure because I have not done the hands-on work of it.

Technical support is offered by HashiCorp, but we can't call HashiCorp for technical support because we don't currently use the enterprise version. Our products are community-driven and the community support is great.

Considering we started from scratch, the initial setup was pretty straightforward. We didn't have any challenges. We started our platform build from scratch using Terraform.

For maintenance-related issues, we use GitHub to find the solution to any problems we encounter; we simply log an issue and follow-up with them.

Provided your environment requires Terraform and/or you have skilled engineers who can perform the required maintenance, I would definitely recommend this solution. Terraform is not justified for use just anywhere; you need to have an experienced team to limit any issues. You need to have a certain level of training to consume the services in their DevOps Toolbox and then use them properly. I definitely support and recommend Terraform, but what you get out of it depends on the business environment as well as the team members' knowledge in Terraform.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of seven; strictly because I was uncomfortable using the ARM template earlier. After another six months, I am sure I will give it a rating of 10, but at this point in time in my experience, I say seven, but not because of the tool itself.

We use it to deploy resources on AWS.

It's very easy to automate functions on the cloud with HashiCorp Terraform. The commands are easy as well.

The syntax is a bit difficult, and it would great if it could be easier.

I've been using HashiCorp Terraform for four and a half years.

HashiCorp Terraform is a stable solution. We have 15 people who use it in our organization.

The initial setup is straightforward and easy.

There are free and paid versions of the solution. We use the free version.

I would recommend HashiCorp Terraform and rate it at eight out of ten. I like that there is a free version of the product, but the coding could be easier.

Terraform is the infrastructure as code solution used across our business. 

The way the modules are divided for infrastructure provisioning and are set up for reliability to offer plug and play functionality has been really useful. This solution makes it easier to manage a multi-cloud environment and have your entire infrastructure as code. 

On occasion, I have noticed a number of bugs in this solution that have needed to be fixed. 

In a future release, it would be great to have an easier way of troubleshooting. We'd like to have a dashboard where company management can get a full view of provisioning.

I have used this solution for three years. 

This is a scalable solution. 

It would be great to have faster resolution of instances where there are bugs in the system. 

Neutral

The initial setup is straightforward. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. 

We use it to provision cloud infrastructure. We use it to provision all kinds of infrastructure from wherever we want, we Terraform to the cloud.

We provision new infrastructure, we update existing infrastructure with it, we manage our DNS records, and also deploy new applications on Kubernetes. That's the main use, but we use it for all of our infrastructures, so it has a lot of different use cases.

Before we used it, we were writing a lot of scripts to provision infrastructure and there weren't guidelines for anything on how to provision and how our environment will look. Now with Terraform, it's all templated and everyone in my team just uses modules that are templates, modules of Terraform, and all our environments look the same. It doesn't matter if it's dev, if it's QAs, if it's production, it looks the same. It just has different names and different types of machines. We want to pay less in the dev environments and QA but we want to have better performance in production. It's just the variable to change the type of machine that we want to use, but the template remains the same.

We save a lot of time with this solution. It also saves a lot of human errors and the whole team knows how to do the same thing.

The most valuable aspect of this solution is that it's agnostic. It can work with different cloud providers, which we may do in the future, so it benefits us. With not much change, I can deploy the same infrastructure to other cloud providers. Now we work with Azure but we can work with AWS or GCP and with minor changes we can deploy the same applications to other clouds. We can replicate the existing cases with minor changes and it's easily deployed.

It should have a more object-oriented approach like different coding languages.

It's really stable. We have no issues with it.

There are around five or six DevOps engineers who use this solution in my company. It's used on a daily basis. We use it for maybe 20% of our infrastructure, but we intend to use it for 100% all with Terraform.

I haven't needed to contact their technical support. 

We switched to Terraform because we wanted to minimize time and minimize human errors. We wanted to have alignment between all of our environments and really just development is faster.

We went with it because I had a really good experience with it in previous jobs.

The initial setup is straightforward. There are some things you need to understand to know if you want to make more complex templates but it's pretty straightforward. It's really flexible. 

Overall, the deployment takes around 15 minutes. 

It's open-source so it's free. 

My advice to someone considering this solution would be to work with the HashiCorp Best Practices of Terraform, work with Terraform modules, and write templates for everything. 

I would rate Terraform a nine out of ten. 

We use the product for cloud deployments, specifically provisioning services in the cloud.

The platform's most valuable feature is the infrastructure as code aspect, which allows us to code the infrastructure part, making deployments more efficient.

One area for improvement could be the inclusion of more dedicated Terraform providers developed by the companies themselves, rather than relying on third-party developers.

Additional features could include more intuitive environment-specific configurations and possibly enhanced support for development and production environments.

I have been using HashiCorp Terraform for approximately six months.

I rate the platform's stability a ten out of ten. 

I rate the platform scalability a ten out of ten. 

The initial setup was straightforward. I rate the process a ten out of ten. 

The product can be cost-effective, especially if you use the CLI and do not require the cloud solutions provided by HashiCorp. It can be used for free, which is beneficial for small companies.

I rate HashiCorp Terraform a ten out of ten. 

The office was working out of their office and they had around nine clients. The workspace would be in AWS and doing a VPC manually would have been a really hard job. The time estimated for doing nine virtual private clouds would have taken more than a month or two. Using Terraform, they were able to finish it in two weeks. The speed at which we could create the infrastructure was much faster than physically doing it. Also, having an audit and log for all the infrastructure was managed a lot easier using Terraform rather than doing it manually.

One of the most valuable features is that it offers the ability to create a VPC, Virtual Private Cloud and VPN connectivity to the VPC can be automated without having to do it manually. 

I still struggle a bit when configuring VPNs when we have multiple rules. If we have five or six virtual private clouds and we have to give rights between those multiple VPCs, we can have big problems.  I think it was a learning curve and then we improved it. 

I have not come across anything that really stopped us from not doing anything for our requirement as of now.

I liked it because since it's scriptable, the way you create the infrastructure is the same way you can delete the infrastructure also. If you created 10 to 20 different services and objects in AWS using a Terraform script, it's much easier for a person to get the whole infrastructure down. You can do a backup and then you don't really need AWS services because either the client does not exist anymore, or there is some gap before the client comes back, you don't have to manually go and delete all the resources. One script would actually remove everything from AWS. 

Cost-wise, going through the script and then removing everything that you have created through the script is much better than manually doing it. That was helpful for the client as well.

We use it to manage infrastructure. For day-to-day work, the main developers were not using Terraform, so it was only three of us who used it. We were working on Terraform, created those scripts, and then gave it to the client for whom I was doing the work. Since it's now scriptable, they are able to manage and do all these small changes. They don't come back to me. Since they don't come back to me, it seems like it is working fine.

Terraform keeps updating its scriptable platform, the engine through which they communicate. So if there is any change in AWS, they keep updating it. Even from the deployment side, they have to be aware of the features, which Terraform still supports and the features, which Terraform doesn't support and then work around accordingly.

The initial setup, like doing the AWS credentials, putting it in place, and getting the API keys are the parts that took time. Otherwise, it is a lot faster and the learning curve is also much easier since it's a YAML-based scripting language. Even a non-programmer in a normal office can understand what is happening in the flow.

The deployment took around 15 days. In around 20 days we were ready with the Terraform scripts and then made small changes. Every time they need a new infrastructure that requires a small change, it would take a day or two. We created the initial Terraform script and gave it to a client so that it could later be managed by the client itself to create and run. Fifteen days was good enough for us to create and test the Terraform infrastructure and then give it to the client.

We started the deployment by seeing how we would divide the infrastructure. One is the list of infrastructure, which we would need irrespective of the clients for the VPC, VPN gateway, and active directory services. Those are all mandatory items that we would need for all the VPCs. And there are some items that are client-specific. We divided it into multiple parts. One is generic, which you will need for all the clients that are a base level. Then you keep playing the client's specific scripts on top of the base script.

It's open-source.

Rather than doing a monolithic Terraform for the whole infrastructure, it would be good for the script to be reusable. Use the base level script that every infrastructure would need. Generating a local IP network and then creating two instances or creating some databases and other basic scripts that all the infrastructure would need should be a base level script. Then add on your base level script with the add-on scripts on top of the base script to create infrastructure that is specific to clients. You can reuse the script, the same base group for many other purposes as well.

Before using Terraform, for auditing, creating machines, etc, we would either rely on AWS infrastructure itself or documents that had infrastructure-related data. Using Terraform, a lot of this data was captured automatically since it's a YAML script. It could be easily exported as a document or Excel file as well. Documentation and infrastructure was much easier to maintain than doing it otherwise.

I would rate Terraform an eight out of ten. 

We use HashiCorp Terraform orchestration tool for infra provisioning (mostly servers), both in the cloud and on-premise environments. This allows for VM provisioning, networking, and storage management, especially in a cloud environment where we have many servers that can't be provisioned one by one.

The most valuable feature is the ease of infrastructure provisioning in a very large environment in the shortest time.

I initially found the initial HashiCorp Terraform difficult to comprehend. It's not straightforward especially in complex cloud environments, requiring proper training to grasp it. Even someone with a background in networking or cybersecurity would need guidance from someone knowledgeable.

Inclusion of revert function or rollback action for any invalid or wrong changes to resources.

I have been using HashiCorp Terraform for approximately one year.

HashiCorp Terraform is highly stable.

I did not use the technical support from the vendor.

Neutral

The initial setup of HashiCorp Terraform is easy to do. The implementation took a few hours to complete for a small cloud environment.

Terraform Enterprise plan is quite expensive!

HashiCorp Terraform is the best platform for creating and managing resources on cloud platforms and other services through their application programming interfaces (APIs) in a cloud environment.

I rate HashiCorp Terraform an eight out of ten.

We use this solution for infrastructure and support for a mobile application for a bank.

This solution could be improved by adding features such as CDM to accelerate the access of data by the users.

It would be useful to be able to test functionality when building infrastructure. Currently we use other tools to do this. 

We have used this solution for one year.

This is a stable solution. 

This is a scalable solution. 

The initial setup is straightforward. It took a few weeks to implement with the help of three engineers. 

This solution is a fast and secure way to provision infrastructure. 

I would rate it a ten out of ten.