Terraform Cloud is offered as a multi-tenant SaaS platform. It offers a free tier for getting started, and can accommodate both small businesses and large organizations. The SaaS product gives businesses the ability to collaborate and work together on projects across different cloud vendors a lot easier. When developing for different providers and working across different teams here are 5 reason why a lot of companies are using terraform cloud today.
Collaboration
Terraform cloud enables teams to collaborate more effectively. When working on building out cloud provider systems such as aws, azure, or google cloud, then having individuals work separately can cause issues. Some of these issues are:
- Users not being able to collaborate on changes made by others
- Work being overwritten by other team members
- Lose visibility of security posture
- No centralized source of truth
Collaboration also helps with making sure your different environments and code changes don’t mix and cause issues with bringing the company down.
Version Control
Version control gives teams the ability to maintain versions of their code. When working within a large group, multiple people can be working on the same code changes. Terraform Cloud allows for you to create workspaces for different projects to help keep these changes in sync. Terraform Cloud works like a CI/CD pipeline.
When you push changes to the cloud with the “terraform plan” or “terraform apply” command. The workspaces will run against your providers checking your current config with your state file and current state of your environment.
Version Control is important in helping maintain code organization across your environment
Remote State Management
State files are a json formatted mapping of resources in your environment. This file can potentially hold secrets and other potential sensitive information about your environment. If this file was to get lost or into the wrong hands, there could be a lot of security concerns. The state file also is the glue to your environment so when collaborating with others it will help them understand what has already been deployed.
Proper state management in Terraform Cloud helps take care of these problems by improving security and collaboration.
Planned Visualization
When making changes to your infrastructure, nothing is worse than implementing something and it breaks with no way to revert back. With Terraform Cloud, you get an easier way to visualize what will be changed from the changes that were made. Since everything is versioned, then its easy to roll back.
But before changes are initially rolled out to your environment when using terraform cloud, you would usually run a terraform plan and that will let you know what things will be added, changed or destroyed.
Scalability
Being able to scale as your team grows is very important. Terraform cloud allows not only for more people to work together simultaneously but also work across different vendors at the same time. The scalability of terraform cloud makes it easier for organizations to work smarter and faster when deploying resources.
Conclusion
I hope this helped in determining why you should consider using terraform cloud. As a user or organization you can setup a free account and start working with any vendor right away on deploying cloud infrastructure.
