Abstracting over Cloud vendors is not a use case for Terraform itself. The value it brings is that you get to specify your infrastructure 'as code', which means

Abstracting over Cloud vendors is not a use case for Terraform itself. The value it brings is that you get to specify your infrastructure 'as code', which means you'll be able to re-create it from code, and reliably deploy changes. There's a lot more benefits, it depends on what you are comparing it against. Coming from a software development background, I'd like to compare it to a wordpress app vs webapp development from something like rails. The wordpress app works fine, is faster to write, but once it gets complex things fall apart. The rails app is maybe a bit more difficult to develop at first, some features might take longer, but it's more flexbile, powerful and when engineered well, it will not hit a ceiling where it just all falls apart.