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I haven't been using it very long but I'll go. My main complaints: - Very steep learning curve. It uses its own configuration language (HCL) which means you ha

I haven't been using it very long but I'll go. My main complaints: - Very steep learning curve. It uses its own configuration language (HCL) which means you have new syntax to learn on top of its overwhelming API. - It's stateful, so you have a state file that you have to store and keep synchronized in your team. There's capabilities for storing the state remotely but it's very much not ideal. You seemingly can't generate that state file from scratch based on your current provider's state. - The templates are atrociously ugly and the string interpolation is limited, has extremely rough edges. - It's very much an 0.x product. I keep hitting bugs. EC2 machines don't destroy properly if they have mounted drives. S3 buckets can't be force-destroyed if they have versioning enabled. Some normalization issues here and there which cause constant changes to show up. - The custom format means the files aren't easily parsed and/or generated unless you're using hashicorp's own hcl go library. This sucks, to say the least. TOML with some conventions and jinja2 templating would have done the job just fine and would have been a ton more readable imho. It's still good software and design. I would definitely pick it up for new project, but I wouldn't bother migrating existing ones just yet unless you know you'll need it. I use it alongside Ansible and the two pair quite nicely.

psadauskas 10y ago
I agree with most of your points, but wanted to point out that Terraform also understands JSON for its config files, their HCL is just a simpler form. In one of my projects, I have most of the configs as .tf files, but another tool generates a bit of JSON (to update the ASG config after creating a new AMI) that Terraform incorporates into its plan.
- scrollaway 10y ago
  That's true. More specifically (and if I understand hcl correctly), HCL is a superset of JSON which means JSON files are HCL files. (Source: https://github.com/hashicorp/hcl https://github.com/hashicorp/hcl) I still wish they'd gone with TOML :) They have good reasoning as to why not JSON/YAML, but those are the issues TOML actually solves and it's just so much more readable imho.
atombender 10y ago
The state management system always struck me as very flawed design, and it's the reason I've not yet used Terraform. After all, it means that you have to start from scratch. If you any existing infrastructure — instances, load balancers, DNS, whatever — then anything you declare in Terraform will conflict, even if it's declared exactly identically. A workaround is to manually reverse-engineer your current state into a state file, or use a third-party tool like Terraforming [1], but it still breaks the second anyone (either accidentally or intentionally for whatever reasons) bypasses Terraform and touches the world directly, so Terraform simply isn't resilient by design. Surely one of the primary uses of a tool like this must be that if something is modified behind your back, you are secure in the knowledge that you can whip out Terraform and it will force the world back into the right shape in a few seconds? That being said, 0.7 has an import command now, so they recognize the problem. It's extremely limited and is not a complete solution yet, however. I never understood the purpose of the state file. A tool like Terraform, from my perspective, should be stateless. It ought to compare its target to the world, and then attempt to converge the world to match the target. You could have local state as an option, in particular to detect interference, but I don't see why it's needed at all times. My current solution is to use Salt (not Salt Cloud, just the Salt "boto" states, using local masterless mode), but it's pretty terrible. I would really want a tool like Terraform, but without the flawed state management. [1] https://github.com/dtan4/terraforming https://github.com/dtan4/terraforming
- jen20 10y ago
  > After all, it means that you have to start from scratch. If you any existing infrastructure — instances, load balancers, DNS, whatever — then anything you declare in Terraform will conflict, even if it's declared exactly identically. One of the major features of the version released today is the ability to import existing resources in to Terraform state.
  - lobster_johnson 10y ago
    I wrote about that. That being said, 0.7 has an import command now, so they recognize the problem. It's extremely limited and is not a complete solution yet, however.

psadauskas 10y ago

I agree with most of your points, but wanted to point out that Terraform also understands JSON for its config files, their HCL is just a simpler form. In one of my projects, I have most of the configs as .tf files, but another tool generates a bit of JSON (to update the ASG config after creating a new AMI) that Terraform incorporates into its plan.

scrollaway 10y ago
That's true. More specifically (and if I understand hcl correctly), HCL is a superset of JSON which means JSON files are HCL files. (Source: https://github.com/hashicorp/hcl https://github.com/hashicorp/hcl) I still wish they'd gone with TOML :) They have good reasoning as to why not JSON/YAML, but those are the issues TOML actually solves and it's just so much more readable imho.

atombender 10y ago

The state management system always struck me as very flawed design, and it's the reason I've not yet used Terraform. After all, it means that you have to start from scratch. If you any existing infrastructure — instances, load balancers, DNS, whatever — then anything you declare in Terraform will conflict, even if it's declared exactly identically. A workaround is to manually reverse-engineer your current state into a state file, or use a third-party tool like Terraforming [1], but it still breaks the second anyone (either accidentally or intentionally for whatever reasons) bypasses Terraform and touches the world directly, so Terraform simply isn't resilient by design. Surely one of the primary uses of a tool like this must be that if something is modified behind your back, you are secure in the knowledge that you can whip out Terraform and it will force the world back into the right shape in a few seconds? That being said, 0.7 has an import command now, so they recognize the problem. It's extremely limited and is not a complete solution yet, however. I never understood the purpose of the state file. A tool like Terraform, from my perspective, should be stateless. It ought to compare its target to the world, and then attempt to converge the world to match the target. You could have local state as an option, in particular to detect interference, but I don't see why it's needed at all times. My current solution is to use Salt (not Salt Cloud, just the Salt "boto" states, using local masterless mode), but it's pretty terrible. I would really want a tool like Terraform, but without the flawed state management. [1] https://github.com/dtan4/terraforming https://github.com/dtan4/terraforming

jen20 10y ago
> After all, it means that you have to start from scratch. If you any existing infrastructure — instances, load balancers, DNS, whatever — then anything you declare in Terraform will conflict, even if it's declared exactly identically. One of the major features of the version released today is the ability to import existing resources in to Terraform state.
- lobster_johnson 10y ago
  I wrote about that. That being said, 0.7 has an import command now, so they recognize the problem. It's extremely limited and is not a complete solution yet, however.