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HashiCorp Terraform

HashiCorp Terraform

Overview

What is HashiCorp Terraform?

Terraform from HashiCorp is a cloud infrastructure automation tool that enables users to create, change, and improve production infrastructure, and it allows infrastructure to be expressed as code. It codifies APIs into declarative configuration files that can be shared amongst…

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Pricing

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Open Source

$0

Cloud

Team & Governance

$20/user

Cloud
per user/per month

Enterprise

Contact sales team

Cloud

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://www.hashicorp.com/products/terr…

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Product Demos

Infrastructure Pipelines with Terraform Cloud

YouTube
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Features

Configuration Management

Tools and features offered by configuration management software.

7.8
Avg 8.1
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Product Details

What is HashiCorp Terraform?

HashiCorp Terraform is an infrastructure as code tool that lets the user define both cloud and on-prem resources in human-readable configuration files that the user can version, reuse, and share. A consistent workflow can then be used to provision and manage infrastructure throughout its lifecycle. Terraform can manage low-level components like compute, storage, and networking resources, as well as high-level components like DNS entries and SaaS features.

Terraform creates and manages resources on cloud platforms and other services through their application programming interfaces (APIs). Providers enable Terraform to work with virtually any platform or service with an accessible API.

HashiCorp Terraform Features

  • Supported: Manage any Infrastructure
  • Supported: Track your infrastructure
  • Supported: Automate changes
  • Supported: Standardize configurations

HashiCorp Terraform Screenshots

Screenshot of Terraform StateScreenshot of Terraform RunsScreenshot of Terraform VariablesScreenshot of Terraform WorkspacesScreenshot of Terraform Cost Estimation

HashiCorp Terraform Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

Terraform from HashiCorp is a cloud infrastructure automation tool that enables users to create, change, and improve production infrastructure, and it allows infrastructure to be expressed as code. It codifies APIs into declarative configuration files that can be shared amongst team members, treated as code, edited, reviewed, and versioned. It is available Open Source, and via Cloud and Self-Hosted editions.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, Jenkins, and GitHub are common alternatives for HashiCorp Terraform.

Reviewers rate Infrastructure Automation highest, with a score of 8.8.

The most common users of HashiCorp Terraform are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews From Top Reviewers

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(1-5 of 29)

Infrastructure as code, finally!

Rating: 9 out of 10
January 13, 2020
Vetted Review
Verified User
HashiCorp Terraform
1 year of experience
We in the software engineering department use Terraform management of AWS and Datadog. Terraform allows us to store and set up host configuration, load balancers, Datadog monitors all as code that can be checked into version control. Terraform neatly abstracts away the details of AWS and Datadog and exposes a simple API, so it makes it possible for every single team, even those without much infrastructure experience, to help maintain the infrastructure. It is also a key component in our deployment process.
  • Support/integration with many infrastructure providers including AWS, Google Cloud, Datadog, Gitlab, Heroku, SignalFX.
  • A neat thing about infrastructure as code is that it solves an age-old problem of infrastructure: knowing the configuration of everything about the network and services is as easy as reading a formatted config file.
Cons
  • Terraform's integration with different providers hasn't matured yet, so the API keeps changing or is buggy.
  • Also, because Terraform is relatively new, documentation/books/blogs are hard to come by, and it's hard to hire DevOps engineers who are familiar with it.
Pretty much anytime your DevOps engineers are managing more than ten machines or when you want multiple teams not focused on DevOps to help own the infrastructure hosting their code. Popular opinion is that Terraform is not very secure, battle-tested, and leaking secrets happen easily on accident. So, Terraform is less ideal when you have to store lots of sensitive secrets that your company is legally required to guard lest it is the end of you. Think Fintech, health-tech.

Infrastructure as Code Done Right!

Rating: 10 out of 10
April 26, 2017
AN
Vetted Review
Verified User
HashiCorp Terraform
2 years of experience
We use Terraform for our clients to implement Infrastructure as Code. Our clients are typically seeking our services to get up to speed on DevOps strategies and culture. We almost always recommend Terraform for cloud infrastructure orchestration especially since Terraform supports various cloud providers and has rich constructs for modularity and reusability.
  • Great implementation of Infrastructure as Code concept.
  • Supports various cloud providers, including AWS, Azure and OpenStack
  • Encourages good design practices
  • Collaboration is made possible by using remote backend to store state files (such as S3)
Cons
  • Product is still maturing and there are some design limitation
  • Refactoring infrastructure code can sometimes become troublesome and unnecessarily require re-creating resources (such as when renaming resources)
  • Collaboration requires proper training or could result in dangerous outcome, engineers may easily overwrite remote state file or step on each other's toes. Collaboration process needs some improvement.
Infrastructure as Code: Best suited for cloud infrastructure but could work for data center infrastructure. Terraform is good for orchestrating infrastructure, not "configuring" it, e.g. even though you can use cloud-init to provision and install packages. For advanced configuration management, you will probably need a tool like Chef or Puppet

Best Infrastructure as code tool in market

Rating: 10 out of 10
October 01, 2024
Vetted Review
Verified User
HashiCorp Terraform
3 years of experience
We use HashiCorp Terraform to deploy resources across various cloud providers as it supports maximum number of providers available in market. Best part of HashiCorp Terraform is terraform module as it provides feature of re usability of code. HashiCorp Terraform helps with Central code management for deployment of resources which is in line with organisational goal.
  • Deployment of resources in AWS
  • Deployment of resources in Azure
  • Deployment of resources in Okta
Cons
  • HashiCorp Terraform should come with inbuilt AI feature, for now they depend third party plugins which doesn’t look like secure way of interacting with AI.
One of the best IAC tool in market supporting wide variety of providers. Easy to understand code with really great documentations available across internet making its usage easy and feasible.

Terraform is the Perfect Tool for Building Infrastructure as Code

Rating: 10 out of 10
March 31, 2020
MJ
Vetted Review
Verified User
HashiCorp Terraform
3 years of experience
Terraform is my team's primary Infrastructure as Code (IaC) application. And while it's not a mandated requirement, it's almost expected that all teams in my organization use Terraform as they build out cloud resources. Using Terraform, we can produce code that can be shared across teams, build common knowledge on best practices for cloud architectures, and build cloud resources quickly.
  • Terraform does a great job of making cloud resources available as code. Essentially, it provides building blocks for the resources available in the cloud.
  • I use the open source version of Terraform and I appreciate the user experience at the command line. Using the switches available, the CLI lends itself to a flow of formatting and validating code before a plan is developed, reviewed, and applied.
  • Managing the state of the resources created with code is tough but Terraform does a good job of this by providing several ways to manage state. My team uses the bucket approach but I have seen teams use object databases and shared files as well. Each approach comes with its pros and cons but at least there are options.
  • During the plan phase, I appreciate that Terraform shows the changes that are about to be applied to resources that already exist. This gives engineers insight into the changes they're about to make, particularly if the changes are not what they expected.
Cons
  • I like Terraforms "desired state" approach to IaC, but sometimes I wish the code was a bit more programmatic. Adding counts and "for_each" statements is nice for creating multiple instances of the same resources. But this approach can be difficult to understand for engineers that come from a programming background. A more expressive approach to looping and other coding styles would be nice.
  • A rollback feature would be a welcome addition to Terraform. At the time I'm writing this, when Terraform encounters an error, it stops on the step where the error is encountered and any resources previously created are left in place. While this is desired in most cases, and option for rolling back those resources would provide functionality similar to other IaC tools.
  • Regarding plan output, a minimized report would be appreciated. Currently I have wrappers around the "terraform plan" command that limit the output to key changes. It would be great if there were switches that built this into the tool.
I think Terraform is well suited for many use cases for Infrastructure as Code:
  • For long running resources, having a single source of truth for their desired configuration is handy, since that configuration can drift over time.
  • For short running or experimental cases, Terraform code can be used to quickly spin up environments before spinning them down just as quickly.
  • If a reference architecture is needed, Terraform code can be used to describe all the resources that make up a stack.
Terraform has plenty of functions and programming capabilities but it's not a general purpose programming language. I can see someone trying to do everything in Terraform but there are plenty of general purpose programming languages that are better suited for common tasks outside of building infrastructure as code.

Terraform: a great infrastructure as a code tool

Rating: 10 out of 10
January 30, 2019
Terraform is used to automate resource deployment in AWS using scripts. It is used by entire IT to deploy systems in AWS. The automation has saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in time and money. Since there is no manual deployment, there are no errors during deployments and developers can deploy in production since everything is defined in scripts.
  • Terraform is a premier IAAS tool.
  • It provides modularization and planning features.
  • It is platform and language agnostic.
  • It is open source and thus has strong community support.
Cons
  • Terraform is vulnerable when it comes to error handling.
  • Often when a terraform job is terminated midway, it leads to an inconsistent state of the deployed resources which needs manual cleanup.
  • Terraform is an open source tool and has a related learning curve.
Terraform is more versatile when compared to cloud formation. It is cloud-agnostic, so unlike cloud formation, it is able to deploy resources in cloud ecosystems other than AWS. The code can be modularized, hence there is ample scope of reuse. It can also be used to deploy apps written in various languages. In short, it makes deployment to cloud a breeze.
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