Terraform

Terraform is the industry-leading open-source Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool that allows teams to define and provision infrastructure across multiple cloud providers using a declarative configuration language. At INFO, we have adopted Terraform as our preferred IaC solution due to its maturity, scalability, and extensive community support.

Why Terraform?

• Market Leadership: Terraform is widely recognized as the standard in IaC, offering a stable and reliable platform backed by a vast user community.

• Declarative Syntax with HCL: Utilizes HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL), which is intuitive and easy to learn, making infrastructure definitions clear and maintainable.

• Extensive Provider Ecosystem: Supports a broad range of cloud providers and services through official and community providers, enabling seamless multi-cloud deployments.

• Robust State Management: Efficiently handles infrastructure state, enabling safe and predictable infrastructure changes with detailed execution plans.

Focus on OpenTofu

• Embracing Open-Source Innovation: With the emergence of OpenTofu, the open-source fork of Terraform, we are committed to supporting community-driven advancements in IaC tooling.

• Vendor Neutrality: OpenTofu ensures that our infrastructure remains free from vendor lock-in, aligning with our principles of openness and flexibility.

• Future-Proofing Infrastructure: By keeping an eye on OpenTofu's developments, we aim to leverage its innovations while maintaining compatibility with existing Terraform configurations.

Adoption at INFO

• Standardization Across Teams: Adopting Terraform allows us to unify our IaC practices, improving collaboration and reducing complexity.

• Scalability and Performance: Terraform's ability to manage complex infrastructures makes it suitable for projects of any size, ensuring reliability as we scale.

• Community and Support: The extensive Terraform community provides a wealth of modules, best practices, and support resources, accelerating development and problem-solving.

Moving Forward

Terraform's position as the market leader in IaC tools, combined with its robust features and strong community backing, makes it the ideal choice for our infrastructure needs. We will continue to invest in Terraform while actively exploring OpenTofu to stay at the forefront of IaC innovation.

We are trialling Terraform to see if it can become our preferred Infrastructure as Code solution. The Terraform Cloud offering (managed Terraform) will also be taken into account.

We are also considering Pulumi as alternative.

Terraform is an open-source Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool which can be used to provision infrastructures on various cloud vendors and SaaS providers.

We continue to believe in Infrastructure as Code but having come across the limitations and challenges of using cloud vendor-specific solutions in this space we now want to assess the use of Terraform.