Terraform Erfahrungen

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.

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

1. It is very extensible and works with multiple cloud platforms, popular hosting platforms like DigitalOcean, GoDaddy etc. Terraform uses providers for interacting with vendor specific APIs for provisioning infrastructure.
2. It uses HCL (Hashicorp language) which is quite powerful compared to plain YAML or JSON. Many other IAC tools use plain YAML or JSON - which can be limiting. With HCL, you get for loops, conditionals, and even the ability to get data from different data sources and even shell scripts
3. It is easy to run Terraform code from a Jenkins or any other build pipeline.

The state file management could be better. Although wrapper solutions like Terragrunt exist, it would be great if Tearrform's native capabilities with state management could be even better. Other nitpick is: secrets end up in plain text in state file. Hashicorp suggest using their product vault to avoid this issue. But, not everyone uses or wants to use Vault.

Deploy Infrastructure rapidly and dependably. Repeatability because of utilization of modules. the suppliers work really hard keeping awake to date on the most recent changes from the Cloud suppliers Features Updates. This makes exploiting the new elements dispatched not an issue. Terraform is totally and absolutely better than utilizing CloudFormation straightforwardly.

The actual language is somewhat surprising and this makes it difficult for new clients to get onboarded into the codebase. While it's improving with later deliveries, essential ideas like "map a variety of choices into a bunch of designs" or "apply this rationale in the event that a variable is indicated" are conceivable however superfluously unwieldy. A rollback component would be a welcome expansion to Terraform. At the time I'm composing this, when Terraform experiences a mistake, it stops on the progression where the blunder is experienced and any assets recently made are left set up. While this is wanted as a rule, and choice for moving back those assets would give usefulness like other IaC devices.

Foremost, terraform is cloud agnostic so you just select your cloud provider and get started with provisioning cloud environment with terraform. The language is easy to understand & allows you to create reusable templates & modules. When making changes it shows all the changes in state that are going to be made during terraform plan, which is very helpful before we actually start applying them.
You can also use remote executors to run some external logic of code through bash before provisioning.

Looping strategies like for_each are rather complex to understand when you are new to terraform.
It does not have a rollback feature & if something fails all the changes before that failed change would still be applied.
Some conditional logics are unnecessarily cumbersome.
Also overally analytics for users running plan & apply is missing, it's better for management purpose & debugging the plan which might have caused an infra issue.

It enables Infrastructure as Code (IaC), allowing you to manage and provision infrastructure using declarative configuration files. Version controlled infrastructure provide consistent environment in dev, stage and prod.

Managing state can become tricky for larger projects. For new users the learning curve for advanced features could be deep.

The ease of use and the speed at which bug fixes and related enhancements can be submitted via GitHub and be approved and so you end up running your amendments without needing to work around them.

One aspect is that there is a library that doesn't include all aspects of Terraform and so dependent applications are not fully capable of exposing all the aspects.

Terraform supports a lot of 3rd party tools. And there are modules from many Cloud providers. The thing I like is that many indie developers write useful modules for Terraform which really helps in automating important tasks. The sky is the limit in automation when you are using Terraform. For example, we used to use Venafi software for SSL renewal which was a manual process and the certificates were placed in buckets. But we were able to automate the process using Venafi provider and local-exec.

User and Access management is a miss. We had to use workspace, and shell scripts to check the correct access of different resources.Also it can get complicated if you don't have a structure for your code. So using templates from start is a good way.

We work with multiple clients, one might have Google Cloud, the other Azure, another Oracle Cloud and some VMWare. Terraform makes it easy to deploy in the cloud or on prem. 80% of the time I am using modules that have been created by others which speeds up our deployments.

Learning curve for IT teams that are used to manual deployments.

Terraform is best cloud management tool which provide infrastructure as code service . we are using terraform for AWS infrastructure management as code. We can use multiple workspace for our project and destroy workspace after use. Terraform uses HashiCrop language for creating human readable infrastructure code we can reuse same code , maintain version and source control. Terraform registry provide ready to use quick feature for easy development .

The only cons I found that sometime it takes times.

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.

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.

● 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.

● 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.