What are the downsides of using terraform? We are currently in the process of redoing a lot of our infrastructure and are considering Terraform.
We had some bad experience in the past with AWS (probably 12-18months ago) and Terraform especially when it comes to manual changes to resources for environments where manual changes for testing purposes are common (think changing security group rules for example). It resulted in us having a broken state and being unable to apply changes to our Terraform deployment without tracing the manual changes and undoing them, so I'm a bit cautious about moving forward with terraform. Have you experienced this recently? I'm intrigued by your comment and would love if you could expand on it.
scaryclam|6 years ago
However, if you really can't change your ways of working, which I understand if you can't, then try out the "terraform refresh" command. I've been importing state recently, to move some of our own infrastructure over to TF, and have found it to be quite useful for things like manual security group changes. Basically, I'm building things up bit by bit, and when one of my states gets out of sync I've been updating the local config and running that command, which brings the state back in line.
In general, once you get your workflows sorted out and running for a while, you're unlikely to have any major issues with Terraform. Just make sure to use remote states and version them whenever you can (for example, turn on versioning on the S3 bucket if you use S3 as the remote).
nijave|6 years ago