What do you like best about the product?

Modular, Secure and Versatile. I can talk about tall the technical benefits of using Terraform but I will start with a soft skill that Terraform provides which is the ability to learn different cloud offerings. GUIs are made to simplify single deployments but when you are configuring a module you can see all the options you have for configuration. I will use Azure Storage Blobs as an example. In the GUI when you configure a storage blob by default it is open and available over the internet if you chose defaults. When you are configuring an Azure Storage blob in Terraform you can see how to quickly disable access from public, enforce TLS 1.2, add storage policies for data retention and many more. In short, it enables engineers to build right from the beggining.

Another favorite is integration. I can easily configure Terraform in Jenkins, Azure DevOps, Git Actions and I can add code security so that I can get suggestions in CI/CD. Even when developing, the local IDEs have plugins to accelerate development with security like Snyk.

The HCL language also allows you do apply software development so you can have conditions, loops, functions and different styles of data inputs (stings, arrays, tuples, etc) for better code readability and structure.

What do you dislike about the product?

When new services come out in cloud providers it might take longer to get a module than using a cloud tool like Bicep or Cloudformation but you can always use the API modules and Hashicorp is good at releasing updates to new features.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

- Multi-cloud infrastructure as code.
- Compliance
- Security