What advice do you have for others considering HashiCorp Terraform?

While it's easy to learn, you need experience with the HashiCorp Terraform language syntax to use it. I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten.

I rate HashiCorp Terraform a ten out of ten.

I recommend the solution because it's easier to write the code and manage. Overall, I rate the solution an eight to nine out of ten.

I've been working with HashiCorp Terraform recently and have deployed environments with it.OpenAI has released GPT Terraform, which Microsoft is heavily investing in. Generic modules are available for deployment. Azure AI Portal and AI Studio are useful tools for creating models. It's straightforward to perform service training and update models for input-output data. HashiCorp Terraform has made handling modules and variables more secure. They've integrated key vaults to ensure secrets and backend storage are protected. Accessing the backend storage could potentially leak sensitive information if not properly encrypted. I'm using GitHub Actions and Azure DevOps. Additionally, I'm exploring an older system within the team that will be set up to support. If the setup is built on old infrastructure, the backend of Terraform works and stores. Vagrant works differently where it doesn't need to check with the infrastructure to see what's there or updated. You get an API call for deployment. Overall, I rate the solution as eight out of ten.

You must use Terraform when your client plans to scale the infrastructure or replicate it in another region in the future. Terraform is beneficial because once you write the code, it becomes easy to create similar resources in other availability zones or regions. For small web applications with limited resources, Terraform might not be necessary. However, if your client anticipates major changes or deployments and is thinking about scaling the infrastructure, Terraform is a must. It makes management easier. Another significant benefit of Terraform or any other IaC tool is that organizations are not reliant on individual resources. For instance, if you lead a DevOps department, you won't depend on a specific DevOps engineer to create the infrastructure. Managing resources through code or cloud automation simplifies scaling the infrastructure without deep knowledge of the underlying code. For example, if you need to create another EC2 instance for your application, applying small changes to your Terraform code is straightforward. Since your infrastructure code is stored in version control systems like GitHub or Bitbucket, it isn't dependent on individual systems. You can pull the code from GitHub, make changes, and apply them regardless of where you are, which adds to the convenience. I prefer Terraform because of the documentation and open-source community. As someone who provides training on various tools, including Terraform, I've observed that many students lack experience with It. One of the main prerequisites for learning Terraform is knowledge of AWS or any other cloud platform on which you want to create your resources. If you know how to create resources manually, it will be much easier to convert them into IaC. Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

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.

Overall, I would rate Terraform as an eight out of ten.

My advice to new users would be to understand that Terraform works like a coding language, so you need to understand how it loops over objects in the same way that coding language loops over. objects You should turn Terraform terms into classic coding terms. Overall, I rate it a ten out of ten.

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 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.

I will rate the solution a five out of ten. This is because multiple other solutions get used with Terraform. For servers, we use Ansible, whereas, for cloud infrastructure, we use Terraform. Developers need Pulumi for implementation. Terraform is facing a lot of competition. I would recommend Terraform to others. If you have more than one environment, you will definitely need Terraform.

I recommend the solution to others. I rate it ten out of ten.

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.

I give the solution eight out of ten. The solution is the most popular for provision in the cloud, not only in Azure.

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.

The solution is great technically for the cloud and automations. It can be used with Azure, AWS, Google, and other clouds if you know the syntax. There are many resources provided and the free version works great for multi-cloud automations. I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

My advice to others is to treat Terraform as code, not just another configuration management tool. It's similar to writing backend code, so approach it with the same mindset and level of care. I rate HashiCorp Terraform a nine out of ten.

I rate Terraform seven out of 10. There aren't many products that do what Terraform does. It's easy to use and set up.

I rate this solution ten out of ten.

It's good, I would rate HashiCorp Terraform an eight out of ten.

Some recommendations:

1. Be ready for the steep learning curve.

2. Use best practices in Terraform - try to keep Terraform and provider versions always updated, use modules, use remote state, use state locking.

3. Use only one method of managing infrastructure - don't mix manual and automated way (Terraform) at least for the same piece of the infrastructure.

4. Use CI/CD pipelines for Terraform.

5. Keep Terraform code in VCS.

I would suggest going for it. I have not had any issue with it yet. I would rate HashiCorp Terraform a nine out of ten.

I rate HashiCorp Terraform a nine out of ten.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

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.

This solution is a fast and secure way to provision infrastructure. I would rate it a ten out of ten.

I use the latest version. It is important to try to not repeat oneself and to utilize the module provided by HashiCorp and others for training purposes.

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.

HashiCorp Terraform is a great product and I think anyone working with infrastructure should have it. On a scale of one to ten I guess I would give HashiCorp Terraform a nine.

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.

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.

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.