Hashicorp Terraform Review

HashiCorp's Terraform is the software to use if you are looking to be able to construct or reconstruct entire infrastructure of an organization/project in a very short period of time and maintain the changes as code.

Pros

● HashiCorp Terraform Integrates with over 125 providers including major cloud providers such as Google Cloud Platform, Azure, AWS etc, version control repository hosting providers such github, gitlab etc and many more. This makes provisioning, management, updating, maintenance and destruction of resources easier. ● HashiCorp products have proper and efficient documentation that makes a new user get started easily. ● HashiCorp products have a large and active community support since their products are open source. ● Hashicorp products have an easy to use interface.

Cons

● Management of state files that holds information of the infrastructure and changes may be an issue sometimes especially if a number of users are allowed to carry out new changes to the infrastructure.

HashiCorp Review

A must-have for defining infrastructure-as-code. HashiCorp enables multi-cloud, vendor agnostic IaC which increases the flexibility, reduces the risks inherent with vendor lock-in, and enables things like DR.

Pros

Open source versions allow you to get started straight away, with cloud and enterprise platforms that easily let you take it to the next level. These tools are a must have for any cloud computing shop. The ability to define the computing environment in code in a platform neutral way, provides the business with the flexibility necessary in 2020.

Cons

Some quirky things in the HCL language, but major improvements were made in HCL2 (speaking specifically of TerraForm). It does take some time to get going with some of the concepts, but the documentation has drastically improved.

Terraform for provisioning cloud resources

1. There was generally one example on each resources in terraform documentation which makes understanding a bit challenging. 2. There are very few developers with the terraform experience. 3. After writing the terraform scripts, the developers has to check the terraform plan properly before proceed the terraform apply command . There is a possibility that Developers run terraform apply command directly which would lead to deletion or modification of the resources and once resource is modified or deleted, there is no way to get the resources back.

Pros

1. Terraform state file which keeps the record of all the provision resources done by using Terraform script. 2. Reduces the repetitive task of developers: If there are resources which are created in Development environment and we need the same resources in Production environment too. Then instead of developers provisioning resources manually, we can easily reuse the terraform scripts that were used in Development environment to provision resources . 3. Terraform manages infrastructure on multiple cloud platforms like Azure, AWS, etc.

Cons

1. Less Examples in documentation. 2. Less support. 3. Since Terraform is new IAAS, there are many changes or upgrades going on.

Infrastructure as code

Overall, the experience is great. It allows us to support complex cloud infrastructures without the risks of manual work.

Pros

Terraform was the first big player in the infrastructure as code game and became a de-facto standard. Byupporting different providers, it allows integrating a huge variety of components and helps to avoid Cloud vendor lock-in.

Cons

Breaking changes across versions make supporting it a bit more complex than it could be.

Cloud Automation through Terraform

Once you get the basic syntax and familiarize your self with the error messages, things become simplified. Overall (with few limitations) I am satisfied with this product.

Pros

Easy to use once you get the syntax Proper documentation available in the Hashicorp site Integration with Git works good State File changes are accurate Software is stable

Cons

Some of the error messages are very cryptic and difficult to debug With more and more IAC being deployed, the state file becomes bigger and bigger and the checks for changes become slower and slower. No UI component is there to resolve issues