The Truth About Terraform and Hybrid Cloud

First conceived more than 25 years ago, Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) is not a new concept. At its heart, it is designed to enable the modeling of infrastructure with code, empowering developers to design, implement, and deploy application infrastructure with known software best practices. The ability to treat infrastructure like code and use the same tools as any other software project ostensibly allows developers to rapidly deploy applications.

An emerging vendor in IaC is HashiCorp’s Terraform, which was introduced in 2015 and has rapidly grown a base of ardent users. Terraform’s co-founder and CTO recently called one of their releases “a milestone…designed to deliver stability, scalability, and interoperability.” He then asserted that “Terraform has emerged as the ‘lingua franca’ for infrastructure.”

While an interesting and thought-provoking statement, data collected as part of our recent CloudBolt Industry Insights report, The Truth About DevOps in the Hybrid Cloud Journey, uncovered a different story regarding Terraform in the context of hybrid cloud infrastructure management.

• Fully 88% of respondents indicate that they are either using or considering using Terraform.
• Only 5% of users in our survey are truly satisfied with Terraform. 75% are only “Somewhat Satisfied.”
• 62% of respondents indicate that deployment of on-premises infrastructure via Terraform is challenging.
• 90% state Terraform requires more custom-coded integrations to other critical tools and systems to work properly.
• Skillsets are another challenge, with 39% pointing out they lack the specific and necessary Terraform expertise.
• 74% state that they need a Cloud Management Platform (CMP) operating in conjunction with Terraform. 58% use DevOps tools like CI/CD or Kubernetes. 56% require configuration management tools like Ansible or Chef. And 51% said scripts.

Learn more in the full report here.