What are the main benefits of using HashiCorp Terraform?

[Chris Pietschmann]

HashiCorp Terraform is an infrastructure as code (IaC) tool that allows users to define and manage their infrastructure resources through declarative configuration files. Some of the main benefits of using Terraform include:

1. Infrastructure as Code: Terraform enables the management of infrastructure resources using code, providing a version-controlled and auditable approach. Infrastructure configurations can be stored in version control systems, shared, and collaboratively developed, making it easier to maintain and reproduce infrastructure environments.

2. Multi-Cloud and Multi-Provider Support: Terraform supports multiple cloud providers, including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and others, allowing users to define and manage infrastructure resources across different cloud environments. This flexibility enables organizations to adopt a multi-cloud strategy or migrate between cloud providers easily.

3. Declarative Language and Resource Graph: Terraform uses a declarative language to define infrastructure configurations. This approach allows users to express the desired state of their infrastructure, and Terraform takes care of provisioning and managing the resources to reach that state. Terraform’s resource graph ensures the dependencies and relationships between resources are managed automatically.

4. Infrastructure Lifecycle Management: Terraform supports the entire lifecycle of infrastructure resources. It can create, update, and destroy resources, enabling efficient infrastructure management. Terraform’s “plan” feature provides a preview of the changes before applying them, reducing the risk of unintended modifications.

5. Community and Ecosystem: Terraform benefits from a large and active community. It has a rich ecosystem of providers, modules, and extensions developed and maintained by the community, providing a wide range of pre-built configurations and integrations for various infrastructure components.

6. Automation and Orchestration: With Terraform, infrastructure provisioning and management can be automated. It integrates well with other automation and orchestration tools, allowing users to incorporate infrastructure provisioning into their CI/CD pipelines or workflows.

7. State Management and Idempotency: Terraform keeps track of the state of managed resources, allowing it to detect changes and perform only the necessary modifications to reach the desired state. This idempotent behavior ensures that applying the same configuration multiple times results in a consistent infrastructure state.

These are some of the main benefits of using HashiCorp Terraform, but the tool offers many more features and advantages that can vary depending on the specific use case and requirements.

If you’re looking to get started with Terraform and to better understand how to use it for your own Infrastructure deployments, then I recommend you also check out the following article: Get Started with Terraform on Microsoft Azure