41 lines
2.0 KiB
Markdown
41 lines
2.0 KiB
Markdown
---
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layout: "intro"
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page_title: "Terraform vs. Custom Solutions"
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sidebar_current: "vs-other-custom"
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description: |-
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Most organizations start by manually managing infrastructure through simple scripts or web-based interfaces. As the infrastructure grows, any manual approach to management becomes both error-prone and tedious, and many organizations begin to home-roll tooling to help automate the mechanical processes involved.
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---
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# Terraform vs. Custom Solutions
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Most organizations start by manually managing infrastructure through
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simple scripts or web-based interfaces. As the infrastructure grows,
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any manual approach to management becomes both error-prone and tedious,
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and many organizations begin to home-roll tooling to help
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automate the mechanical processes involved.
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These tools require time and resources to build and maintain.
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As tools of necessity, they represent the minimum viable
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features needed by an organization, being built to handle only
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the immediate needs. As a result, they are often hard
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to extend and difficult to maintain. Because the tooling must be
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updated in lockstep with any new features or infrastructure,
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it becomes the limiting factor for how quickly the infrastructure
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can evolve.
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Terraform is designed to tackle these challenges. It provides a simple,
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unified syntax, allowing almost any resource to be managed without
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learning new tooling. By capturing all the resources required, the
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dependencies between them can be resolved automatically so that operators
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do not need to remember and reason about them. Removing the burden
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of building the tool allows operators to focus on their infrastructure
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and not the tooling.
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Furthermore, Terraform is an open source tool. In addition to
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HashiCorp, the community around Terraform helps to extend its features,
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fix bugs and document new use cases. Terraform helps solve a problem
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that exists in every organization and provides a standard that can
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be adopted to avoid reinventing the wheel between and within organizations.
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Its open source nature ensures it will be around in the long term.
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