IBM Terraform Reviews & Insights

Score8.8 out of 10

169 Reviews and Ratings

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for IBM Terraform are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

Fast and Reliable Infrastructure Deployment: Users appreciate Terraform's ability to deploy infrastructure quickly and reliably. Several reviewers have mentioned that they were able to provision resources efficiently, saving them time and effort in the deployment process.

Modular Approach with Reusable Modules: The use of modules in Terraform is highly valued by users, as it enables repeatability and encourages code reuse. Many reviewers have stated that they find it easy to share and reuse functionality across deployments, promoting collaboration and consistency among teams.

Large Ecosystem of Modules for Various Providers: Users highly value the extensive ecosystem of modules available in Terraform for various providers. Numerous reviewers have stated that this allows them to easily access strong default configurations for many services, saving them time and effort in setting up their infrastructure.

IBM Terraform Reviews

30 Reviews

HashiCorp Terraform, the simple and versatile IAC

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

October 31, 2024

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We integrated HashiCorp Terraform for AWS configuration, such as VPC setup, subnets, routing, security groups, endpoints, etc.

Pros

Automation
easy to deploy
simplicity in the coding language

Cons

Importing resources into the code could be more automated.

Likelihood to Recommend

It is very useful for deploying a system or part of a system in the cloud. Such as AWS or Azure.You can also use it to manage the users and permissions of a database.You can have a version control by saving the IAC in a code repository.

Verified User

Consultant in Information Technology (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

Great for automating repetitive and similar tasks

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

October 7, 2024

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

There are two main problems the product solves for us. The first one is that it maintained our old EC2 image and the Matillion ETL instance it held; including backups, scheduled spin up times, snapshots etc. The second is to ingest raw data from our S3 data lake into Snowflake as raw data, and also to flatten it to tabular data.

Pros

Standardised templating - Great for repetitive tasks or processes. For example flattening JSON files into tables. We can make a Terraform template which can be duplicated and used for many different file schemas.
Dynamic/static variables - Getting information about the stage/instance Terraform is running in can help dynamically generate assets. E.g. making prod vs dev vs non-live assets based on the instance to Git branch.
Vast array of connectors - Terraform seems to connect with lots of different technologies, and are often maintained by the tech provider so you know it's going to be designed in the best way possible for that tech.

Cons

Steep learning curve - As with most IaaC tools, it can take time to learn the architecture of Terraform, nomenclatures, process of implementation etc.
Hanging state lock files - Potentially an implementation issue rather than an terraform issue, but if a state lock file isn't properly closed/unlocked then that instance of terraform can't be tested or ran again until the file becomes unlocked. E.g. stopping a Terraform PLAN pipeline half way through means the state lock file will hang/remain locked until it's explicitly told to be unlocked again.
Unhelpful errors - Potentially an issue with the connector provider, but some errors can be generic, or too much information is given meaning finding the root cause can be tricky.

Likelihood to Recommend

Anything that needs to be repeated en masse. Terraform is great at taking a template and have it be repeated across your estate. You can dynamically change the assets they're generating depending on certain variables. Which means though templated assets will all be similar, they're allowed to have unique properties about them. For example flattening JSON into tabular data and ensuring the flattening code is unique to the file's schema.

Callum O'Connor

Senior Analytics Engineer in Corporate at Adaptavist (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Verified on LinkedIn

Best Infrastructure as code tool in market

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

October 1, 2024

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Verified User

Consultant in Engineering (5001-10,000 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

Tough learning curve, but pays off

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

June 27, 2024

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

HashiCorp Terraform is an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool that allows us to describe resources that need to exist in our various cloud platforms, which provides a history and code review process.

Pros

Infrastructure as Code
3rd Party Provider Support

Cons

Debugging

Likelihood to Recommend

HashiCorp Terraform has a pretty difficult learning curve, but eventually the value is apparent once you get the grasp of it. We have lots of cloud resources, which are particularly well suited for an IaC platform. HashiCorp Terraform's excellent provider ecosystem allows us to implement large infrastructure changes with very few manual operations, and is critical to allowing us to bring up new environments quickly.

Verified User

Engineer in Engineering (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

Hashicorp Terraform Review

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

June 24, 2024

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are using HashiCorp Terraform CLI extensively in our platform for creating and managing AWS and Kubernetes resources. HashiCorp Terraform helps us to create multiple resources quickly within minutes. We are using it to differentiate configurations for different environments thereby helping us to manage our resources easily. Modules have also helped us in creating dynamic reusable templates for resource creations.

Pros

AWS and GCP resource provisioning like VM, IAM roles and users, EKS clisters
State management for maintaining existing resources and have a single source of truth.
Reusable codebase for different configurations using HashiCorp Terraform modules

Cons

Infrastructure Testing using native framework or mock tests
Importing multiple resources at a time
Documentation for providers and corresponding APIs can be improved

Likelihood to Recommend

Provisioning and managing cloud resources is great.
State management as well as reusable modules help greatly creating resources quickly.
onfiguration management like bootstraping a VM or running shell scripts commands can is quite tricky with HashiCorp Terraform.

Verified User

Consultant in Engineering (5001-10,000 employees)

Vetted Review

6 years of experience

HashiCorp Terraform - make IT boring again (in a good way...)

Rating: 5 out of 10

May 24, 2023

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use HashiCorp Terraform to create development and production assets in AWS, Digital Ocean, and Linode environments.

Pros

It has a rich set of plugins to with with many cloud providers
It tracks the state of your assets, if they exist or need to be built or changed
It's easy to collaborate with others by sharing the state file

Cons

In my opinion, simple tasks like rebooting a server are cumbersome
Some cloud providers may not offer full support for all features of HashiCorp Terraform

Likelihood to Recommend

HashiCorp Terraform is very well suited for managing cloud-based assets for major cloud providers, including private cloud environments like Xen Orchestra and Proxmox for example. However some providers don't offer support for all of the features. It's not well suited at all for configuring cloud assets; in my opinion, tools like Ansible are much better suited for that.

Eric Mintz

CEO in Professional Services at EM Squared (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

View profile

The de facto tool for provisioning infrastructure today

Rating: 9 out of 10

April 26, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Terraform to provision all our infrastructure in all major cloud providers (AWS,GCP,Azure), we have invested a lot to make our code repeatable and scalable as we need to support multiple accounts in each cloud provider.

Pros

Support all major cloud providers
good documentation
good support of providers

Cons

We need the tool to be easier to code logic similar like the programming languages we use
Creating a CICD pipeline is hard
having a single state file is a disadvantage, terraform runs slow if it's not running in the same network where the state file is

Likelihood to Recommend

Terraform is the de-factor tool to provision infrastructure in an automated way, there are plenty of documentation and examples of people using the tool.
Terraform framework can be considered complicated to write efficient code, especially if you are doing some more complex use cases.
Creating efficient CICD pipelines is quiet challenge , I believe Terraform future will be replaced by Kubernetes operators.

Verified User

Manager in Engineering (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

Cloud Engineer review of Terraform

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

September 28, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It is used by our Cloud Services team. The business problems it addresses are automation and repeatability for things like multi environment deployments or for deploying duplicate architecture for each customer that a client may have. Our organization deals with many clients every day and some want their cloud environments to be architected in Terraform in order to easily deploy to new accounts, cloud providers, or even to other regions within an account.

Pros

Provides detailed examples with documentation
Allows public modules to be easily used for simple coding
Easy setup and deployment to start writing Terraform

Cons

Finding what resources and services are created by Terraform within a cloud environment - you can use tags but it is not as easy as it can be.
Provide direction on proper coding and best practices of how to setup the templates/modules.

Likelihood to Recommend

It is great for deploying relatively static architectures to new accounts or regions in the cloud. It can easily do other architectures but the best case is resources that are defined, the parameters can change but when you know what resources/services you need it's great. Less appropriate are cases where you will be dynamically changing resources or parameters on certain resources. It also might be difficult to write modules that use Lambda and things that have their own code base. This can be done but it's not as easy as simple tasks.

Verified User

Engineer in Research & Development (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Terraform Review

Rating: 8 out of 10

July 12, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Terraform is currently being used to deploy infrastructure to GCP. We are mindful of the fact that some components might need other cloud providers and as Terraform is a cross-platform tool it is easier to manage the infrastructure with Terraform. It helps to iterate quickly.

Pros

Supports a lot of other infrastructure providers like AWS, GCP, Datadog.
It provides the building blocks for quite a few resources
Appreciate adding the Terraform graph command

Cons

The command Terraform plan can be more sophisticated.
The language can be difficult for novice users
It is quite difficult to do major upgrades without breaking something

Likelihood to Recommend

Terraform is amazing when you have a cloud environment. You can spend time designing the config files but you can save a lot of time when you have to deploy the same environment multiple times. For experimental cases, Terraform can be easily used to spin up environments and easily destroy them.

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

Really good tool for Infrastructure

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

June 19, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Terraform across multiple clients to track and maintain infrastructure as a code, Using Terraform help us to keep the tracking of the systems and improve the time to market, We use Terraform for deploy similar environments for development, staging and productions.

Pros

Developed in Go is really efficient and fast
Use a really simple language easy to learn
The modular system is the state of the art in development

Cons

The need to keep one standard between versions
[I feel] The migration tool require improvement when you upgrade from one version to another
Import the infrastructure into the config require more work

Likelihood to Recommend

When you need to deploy infrastructure and keep a track of your job. Use Terraform for keep your infrastructure make easy to find human errors and keep the history of changes in git or any repository if you use Terraform with your CICD tool you are in the state of the art in infrastructure management .

Guillermo Buritica Tobon

Consultant - Site Reliability Engineering Manager (SRE) - Managed Services in Professional Services at Servian (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

View profile

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Great for automating repetitive and similar tasks

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

October 7, 2024

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

Standardised templating - Great for repetitive tasks or processes. For example flattening JSON files into tables. We can make a Terraform template which can be duplicated and used for many different file schemas.
Dynamic/static variables - Getting information about the stage/instance Terraform is running in can help dynamically generate assets. E.g. making prod vs dev vs non-live assets based on the instance to Git branch.
Vast array of connectors - Terraform seems to connect with lots of different technologies, and are often maintained by the tech provider so you know it's going to be designed in the best way possible for that tech.

Cons

Steep learning curve - As with most IaaC tools, it can take time to learn the architecture of Terraform, nomenclatures, process of implementation etc.
Hanging state lock files - Potentially an implementation issue rather than an terraform issue, but if a state lock file isn't properly closed/unlocked then that instance of terraform can't be tested or ran again until the file becomes unlocked. E.g. stopping a Terraform PLAN pipeline half way through means the state lock file will hang/remain locked until it's explicitly told to be unlocked again.
Unhelpful errors - Potentially an issue with the connector provider, but some errors can be generic, or too much information is given meaning finding the root cause can be tricky.

Likelihood to Recommend

Callum O'Connor

Senior Analytics Engineer in Corporate at Adaptavist (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Verified on LinkedIn