[duggan]

> Full disclosure: I'm building a much, much better provisioner for multi-provider cloud infrastructure. Neither of the projects I recommend are mine; mine's not done yet.

One of the convenient things about software that doesn't exist is that it doesn't have any bugs.

Let your software speak for itself when it exists; until then, this seems an undeserved critique of software, and a team, that is solving problems every day.

[tptacek]

This is a crazy sentiment. I was just considering checking out Terraform, and I'm really glad to have read the previous commenter's experience.

[Gigablah]

I've been using Terraform for over a year, maintaining a standard 3 AZ load balanced production cluster.

HCL has improved dramatically, and now that template strings are a thing, most of my variable interpolation issues are solved. However you still can't specify lists as input variables so you frequently have to resort to joining and splitting strings. It's hackish and worse, changing one value in the list will invalidate all other resources that use the variable.

Race conditions and dependency cycles are still a problem. Particularly with auto scaling groups and launch configurations -- I have to migrate them in two steps (create then destroy) to avoid a conflict. Same with EBS volumes, I ended up scripting my instance to attach the volume by itself, otherwise there's ordering issues when destroying and replacing.

There's also missing features, such as the ability to create elasticache redis clusters and cloudformation resources.

I'm still glad that I went with Terraform though. It takes a good amount of time to get around the limitations and bugs, which can be really frustrating, but when it works, it works beautifully.