[mleonhard]

Terraform keeps track of resources it creates. One can remove resources (VMs, managed databases, persistent volumes, DNS records) from the config file and Terraform will cleanly delete them. This is a crucial feature for most deployments.

For example, I deployed an app backend to DigitalOcean with a load balancer, 2x replicated API server, 2x replicated worker process, managed database, file storage, and static website. Terraform is tracking 114 resources for each deployment.

It seems that automatic removal is poorly supported by Ansible, Chef, Puppet, Salt, etc. One can explicitly add items to a "to_remove" list, but this is error-prone.

Terraform has many limitations and problems, but I have found no better tool.