HashiCorp Terraform Reviews

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. 

We are using it for infrastructure as code automation. We are running its latest version.

The state backend, automated describe functionality, modular structures, and variablization using templates are most valuable.

The state locking functionality can be improved. In certain situations, we have to force-unlock the state, which sometimes does not work. When that happens, we have to manually go to the state backend and remove that particular state, which is kind of a cumbersome process.

It should also have more functions, more expressions, and support for more products.

I have been using this solution for almost four years.

It has good stability.

It is good in terms of scalability. We have almost 35 to 40 users. We definitely plan to increase its usage.

We did interact with their technical support. It was easy to schedule a call with them. It was also easy to contact their sales team and the support team. It was definitely a good experience.

We had AWS CloudFormation as well as Azure ARM templates.

Its initial setup is quite good and simple. It didn't take more than one and a half hours.

I did it myself. We have four people for its maintenance. We have one admin and three deployers.

They have given it to us at a monthly cost, but it is on a yearly basis.

I would advise others to understand the state backend and how Terraform works. They should also go through functions as well as expressions in the Terraform official documentation.

I would rate HashiCorp Terraform an eight out of ten.

We are using Terraform to manage our multi-cloud requirement for different demos and test environments. It helps us set up the entire environment in a few mins with the exact configuration in AWS, Azure, or GCP, along with other setups like a database, Kubernetes, etc.

Terraform helped us to standardized our infrastructure setup and to reduce errors occurring due to manual execution. It has made our environment more efficient.

The most valuable feature is the support for different platforms like cloud, datacenters, VCS, databases, various storage types, and Kubernetes.

They have added a feature that helps us to import existing resources to our workspace, but if they can help us to create the code for the import, as well, then it would be a great addition.

We have been using HashiCorp Terraform for more than two years.

We should always check the changes or impact of new release which is common for all tools so for me its good in terms of stability.

The scalability is good.

We have used platform CLIs and other customized scripting solutions that need lots of maintenance and care.

The initial setup is quite easy and straightforward.

The setup for Terraform is quite easy and currently, we are using their community version along with Jenkins.

We have evaluated other options like CloudFormation and Cloud Deployment Manager, but those were platform-dependent tools, so not suited for our multi-cloud model.