78 engineers on Hacker News describe using Terraform first-hand: 20 endorse it, 7 regret it, 5 are mixed.
“went from Cloudformation -> CDK -> Terraform -> Pulumi and honestly find it the most approachable for other engineers... (sorry HCL)”
regret · production · here2learnstuff · 2025-12-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Terraform's robust provider ecosystem meant that we could e.g. substitute Docker containers for RDS and MinIO for S3”
endorse · production · 18nleung · 2025-10-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Much better to make modules for common stuff, and then compose them in your different environments.”
endorse · production · jitl · 2025-02-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I have terraform patterns that, once worked out, are cookie cutter.”
endorse · production · raffraffraff · 2024-11-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“the infrastructure described in terraform is a much more difficult thing to change and evolve over time.”
regret · production · smashed · 2024-02-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Having everything in terraform really is lovely, from networks to machines it's all in my editor.”
endorse · production · efxhoy · 2023-12-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“State management in TF is kneecapped by the lack of variable support in backend blocks.”
regret · production · maccard · 2023-08-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Switching to TF significantly sped up our builds for minor commits.”
endorse · production · Centigonal · 2023-08-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We switched to Terraform about half a decade ago over that and it was such a great removal of friction from your development cycle.”
endorse · production · 5 yr · acdha · 2023-01-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“This is how we use it in our company. The SRE/Platform Engineers (where I work) build very advanced, complex, and powerful modules”
endorse · production · jacurtis · 2022-12-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Trying to manage it through terraform is quite clunky.”
regret · production · everfrustrated · 2022-09-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Our terraform state is a huge blob though and if we started from scratch i think we would have defaulted to EKS”
mixed · production · efxhoy · 2022-08-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I can't think of a worse way to manage Kubernetes than Terraform. After years of running into issues, I think it's really only suitable for small clusters.”
regret · production · davewritescode · 2022-07-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“terraform as a separate language was enough of a barrier that it prevented a good deal of our developers from contributing to the infrastructure codebase”
regret · production · fvdessen · 2022-05-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“replacing it with terraform was easy: the hard part was understanding what was needed and what was fluff.”
endorse · production · dijit · 2022-04-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“one of the reasons why we switched to Terraform was because it let us take advantage of new AWS features on average much faster than CloudFormation.”
endorse · production · acdha · 2021-10-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I'd rather use good patterns around Terraform design than ever go back.”
endorse · production · femiagbabiaka · 2021-06-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been incredibly happy with this workflow.”
endorse · production · ManWith2Plans · 2020-12-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?“would prefer to move everything to TF early next year with the core infrastructure managed in the terragrunt way”
endorse · production · leetrout · 2020-12-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?“since the advent of Nix and now Terraform, repeatability hasn't been a problem.”
endorse · production · akiselev · 2020-11-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We also use Terraform for managing CloudFlare and all sorts of other providers. It has been a dream.”
endorse · production · busterarm · 2020-10-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use terraform and terragrunt by themselves to deploy lambdas. No frameworks.”
endorse · production · lovehashbrowns · 2020-10-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“thanks to terraform we rarely have to use it.”
endorse · production · znpy · 2020-08-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“it's a major reason why we switched to Terraform, along with not having to wait 6-12 months for support for new AWS features”
endorse · production · acdha · 2020-04-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've found it much easier to write declarative configs in Terraform over the years.”
endorse · production · mtalantikite · 2020-04-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“TF is pretty much the worst solution for our problems. Kube or even Docker Swarm would serve us much better.”
regret · production · hinkley · 2018-12-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Terraform is definitely the best tool we have at the moment for deploying to the cloud; but that doesn't mean it isn't still bloody annoying to work with”
mixed · production · laumars · 2018-05-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We've been using ECS for a while together with Terraform for managing the whole infrastructure in immutable and declarative way, and it has been great so far.”
endorse · production · adambyrtek · 2017-12-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I'm using TerraForm which, although it's a bit immature and thus cumbersome to set up, has been getting the job done”
mixed · personal · Vinnl · 2017-12-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use Terraform for our foundation and a clever Cloudformation custom resource hack”
endorse · production · Rapzid · 2017-11-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“terraform (which has so much potential) is also so rough around the edges we've wrapped it in a mess of our own tooling”
mixed · production · woodhull · 2016-08-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We've been using Terraform extensively for our production deployment ... it works for the most part. There's still a hefty amount of bugs”
mixed · production · Gigablah · 2014-12-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“80% of which is YAML and Terraform these days”
neutral · production · guhcampos · 2026-11-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I had the chance to learn IaC and generally using AWS through a project”
neutral · production · NorthSouthNorth · 2026-10-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Besides Terraform, in my team we use Packer to build reusable "golden" machine images but also Ansible to configure live machines.”
neutral · production · hangrybear666 · 2026-10-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“These days we do tests, schema migrations, terraform, staging sites, traffic migration, monitoring, logging”
neutral · production · jopsen · 2026-10-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“AI tools managing our services using ansible/terraform”
neutral · production · cheema33 · 2026-08-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“it feels weird to have to set up an artificial TF module around our entire codebase”
neutral · production · FrenchyJiby · 2025-02-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“My team also uses Nix and devenv to manage the local development environments for... our Terraform repo”
neutral · production · pxc · 2024-11-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“the few of us working in terraform”
neutral · production · hinkley · 2024-10-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Terraform to provision the k8s clusters, workloads deployed to k8s.”
neutral · production · freedomben · 2023-12-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“they don't even trust (and some don't know how to run) my Terraform or CloudFormation scripts”
neutral · production · whstl · 2023-10-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Terraform idempotent setup of VMs with immutable Linux server OS, running containers.”
neutral · production · INTPenis · 2023-09-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I started back in 2016 building k8s clusters from scratch via terraform and bash scripting.”
neutral · production · 7 yr · jml78 · 2023-08-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“After spending a couple of days in terraform (I'm no infra expert) creating roles to assume, cross account permissions”
neutral · production · efxhoy · 2023-05-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using Terraform for a couple of years, Pulumi for about a year”
neutral · production · 2 yr · mihau · 2022-12-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Terraform to kick off the infrastructure in the "cloud".”
neutral · production · brabel · 2022-12-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Terraform provisions servers (we use hoster with OpenStack), then I manually run kubeadm with prepared configs”
neutral · production · vbezhenar · 2022-12-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“currently working on automating it with terraform”
neutral · production · pyrale · 2021-12-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Just to name the ones we use at Helsinki City.”
neutral · production · gatestone · 2021-12-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“The machines are managed by terraform and packer”
neutral · production · maccard · 2021-12-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using Terraform, my setup is basically three projects: dev prod builds”
neutral · production · bamboozled · 2021-12-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“onto a new bare-metal host on Equinix Metal using Terraform and the new faasd project”
neutral · production · alexellisuk · 2021-10-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've had similarly complicated problems with Terraform, Ansible, Chef and Puppet and just plain Linux as I have had with Kubernetes.”
neutral · personal · cameronh90 · 2021-09-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run our Terraform pipeline via Azure DevOps.”
neutral · production · rjbwork · 2021-07-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“builds and deploys ephemeral docker, CDK, and terraform based apps”
neutral · production · wjossey · 2021-06-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“It was just a simple code change in our terraform code to set the config from false to true and cycle the machines.”
neutral · production · snorberhuis · 2021-02-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Terraform will not re-run the null resource provisioner so long as the source code does not change”
neutral · production · felixhuttmann · 2020-12-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?“for certain programs on my desktop (mainly firefox, github cli, azure cli, aws cli, terraform)”
neutral · personal · pferde · 2020-12-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“42 <-- different types of Google Cloud resources we use in our Terraform configs.”
neutral · production · yegle · 2020-12-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using this terraform provider quite a lot lately.”
neutral · production · tthayer · 2020-12-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“our policy rules have access to the entire terraform state, the details of the plan/apply, etc.”
neutral · production · arkadiyt · 2020-12-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“using GitLab CI and their Terraform support. We declare the mirror state and Terraform makes it so.”
neutral · production · neomantra · 2020-11-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Deploy all infrastructure from code via cloudformation or terraform.”
neutral · production · ben509 · 2020-08-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I tweak a number in Terraform templates and manually run the ansible playbook for each new server.”
neutral · production · erikrothoff · 2020-08-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“When we migrated to IaC (terraform) we tagged nearly all of our resources and set up quite a few budgets”
neutral · production · dtech · 2020-08-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“The app terraform code required only 1 variable change.”
neutral · production · dtech · 2020-06-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We switched to Pulumi from terraform for a new project because we can use it for both cloud infrastructure and for k8s configuration.”
neutral · production · gregwebs · 2020-04-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“All of our AWS resources are created and tracked through Terraform but services are created through Convox”
neutral · production · dmlittle · 2018-12-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Used Apex+Terrform to manage whole infra for the ad network.”
neutral · production · InGodsName · 2018-12-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I learned and brought in production the followings: Ansible and Terraform”
neutral · production · apeacox · 2018-12-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Our use of Skycfg with Terraform is still very basic, using Terraform's JSON syntax”
neutral · production · jmillikin · 2018-12-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We transitioned out of AWS where we had relatively well managed instances of our stack managed with chef and terraform”
neutral · production · halbritt · 2018-10-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“our puppeted infrastructure that we run on vms and manage with terraform”
neutral · production · markbnj · 2018-05-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we started with a terraform/make implementation of hightower's hardway”
neutral · production · sleepybrett · 2018-05-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use Terraform for creating, managing environment variables, and permissions/log groups/etc.”
neutral · production · aeikenberry · 2017-06-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I am all in on the Hashicorp stack (we use Vagrant, Packer, Terraform and Consul)”
neutral · production · n42 · 2015-07-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use terraform to deploy to multiple clouds so you don't get locked in to something like cloudformation.”
neutral · production · steveb · 2015-06-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?