- Scalability since you're a small shop, it doesn't seem a huge deal to have to setup networking and other scaffolding manually. But as your company grows and m

- Scalability since you're a small shop, it doesn't seem a huge deal to have to setup networking and other scaffolding manually. But as your company grows and more teams join, will you provision these things for every team by hand? What if they want to experiment with different networking configurations? - Disaster Recovery: Imagine for whatever reason your VPC is completely destroyed, all your VM's are gone. You still have data backed up (you do backups don't you? :)). Your company has to inevitably be down for some time, but how long would it take to restore everything? Terraform can reduce this from days/weeks to minutes; all configuration is there in code, is reproducible. Even if you don't/can't use terraform itself, you still have captured all your infra config information in code and not just in a Google Doc/Evernote/Post it notes. - Audit Trail: You want to empower developers to make changes to infrastructure without opening a ticket and asking you to do it. But if they don't open a ticket, it might make your compliance story much harder. If they do open a ticket, you now have a huge ticket backlog so you hire more engineers .... kinda relates to the point about scalability. Using Terraform, and enforcing infra changes through terraform, you have a super simple audit story, and will know exactly who made the changes, when they were made, for what reason etc. - Infra Convergence: Its a fact of life that you need to make temporary infra changes for fixing fires, hotfixes, super important custom customer request etc. If you allow your infrastructure to be cluttered with these one off changes, it will be messy, developers won't give a shit when making new changes, and often everyone will have permissions over everything. Using terraform, every time you make changes to infra, you discover these manual changes and either revert them (if they're one offs) or commit them to code (if they're meant to be permanant) I'm a new user to terraform, and it certainly has its problems (its still 0.* for chrissake). But... it has been a very useful tool when used correctly and with discipline.