Creating my personal cloud with HashiCorp

What does it mean to host a personal cloud vs hosting a server? I thought the point of using cloud services was so you didn’t have to host it yourself.

Re: Creating my personal cloud with HashiCorp

#5

Post by shell0x » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 8:54 AM UTC

As a DevOps guy, I'm not a huge fan of Terraform.

Often I hear from enterprises that Terraform is cloud agnostic, but that's often very wrong. Terraform modules are still specific to the cloud platform and a rewrite is required to port an app running on AWS to GCP.

If you use AWS, you're probably better off to use AWS Cloudformation and for GCP Google Cloud Deployment manager.

A business reason is often that the engineers are more familiar with Terraform already, but learning Cloudformation is really not that hard...And if you can't work out how to use a basic tool, you should not be running infrastructure anyway, because IT is a constant cycle of change.

I'm not saying Terraform is not good, but I just think a native solution of the platform is preferable over a 3rd party tool.

Re: Creating my personal cloud with HashiCorp

#6

Post by shell0x » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 8:56 AM UTC

reidjs wrote: post #4

What does it mean to host a personal cloud vs hosting a server? I thought the point of using cloud services was so you didn’t have to host it yourself.

Aren't a lot of people just using cloud instead of server now? It's similar to people saying I run on EC2, which is a server, and 95% of the time it's basically a VM.

Re: Creating my personal cloud with HashiCorp

#7

Post by kosolam » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 8:59 AM UTC

shell0x wrote: post #5

As a DevOps guy, I'm not a huge fan of Terraform. Often I hear from enterprises that Terraform is cloud agnostic, but that's often very wrong. Terraform modules are still specific to the cloud platform and a rewrite is required to port an app running on AWS to GCP. If you use AWS, you're probably better off to use AWS Cloudformation and for GCP Google Cloud Deployment manager. A business reason is often that the engi…

If you are saying that it’s better to run native than Terraform then to me it means that Terraform is not good enough - which is also my experience from poking it. It covers all use cases on all clouds, buy only ~80% of each use case. The rest you have to figure out by yourself. Which often means diving into CloudFormation and such - so basically losing the advantage of Terraform.

Re: Creating my personal cloud with HashiCorp

#8

Post by Thev00d00 » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 9:03 AM UTC

kosolam wrote: post #7

shell0x wrote: post #5

As a DevOps guy, I'm not a huge fan of Terraform. Often I hear from enterprises that Terraform is cloud agnostic, but that's often very wrong. Terraform modules are still specific to the cloud platform and a rewrite is required to port an app running on AWS to GCP. If you use AWS, you're probably better off to use AWS Cloudformation and for GCP Google Cloud Deployment manager. A business reason is often that the engi…

If you are saying that it’s better to run native than Terraform then to me it means that Terraform is not good enough - which is also my experience from poking it. It covers all use cases on all clouds, buy only ~80% of each use case. The rest you have to figure out by yourself. Which often means diving into CloudFormation and such - so basically losing the advantage of Terraform.

I think it varies on the quality of the providers, at least in AWS I've yet to come across something missing

Re: Creating my personal cloud with HashiCorp

#9

Post by shell0x » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 9:04 AM UTC

kosolam wrote: post #7

shell0x wrote: post #5

As a DevOps guy, I'm not a huge fan of Terraform. Often I hear from enterprises that Terraform is cloud agnostic, but that's often very wrong. Terraform modules are still specific to the cloud platform and a rewrite is required to port an app running on AWS to GCP. If you use AWS, you're probably better off to use AWS Cloudformation and for GCP Google Cloud Deployment manager. A business reason is often that the engi…

If you are saying that it’s better to run native than Terraform then to me it means that Terraform is not good enough - which is also my experience from poking it. It covers all use cases on all clouds, buy only ~80% of each use case. The rest you have to figure out by yourself. Which often means diving into CloudFormation and such - so basically losing the advantage of Terraform.

Basically right. And every time the platform changes, terraform has to implement it too! And more often than not, it's supported in the providers implementation than terraform.

I think terraform was better before, but now CloudFormation for me is good enough, so I don't see the point of Terraform.

Cloudformation also has Drift detection now and I really dislike Terraforms state files.

Re: Creating my personal cloud with HashiCorp

#10

Post by shell0x » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 9:04 AM UTC

Thev00d00 wrote: post #8

kosolam wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are saying that it’s better to run native than Terraform then to me it means that Terraform is not good enough - which is also my experience from poking it. It covers all use cases on all clouds, buy only ~80% of each use case. The rest you have to figure out by yourself. Which often means diving into CloudFormation and such - so basically losing the advantage of Terraform.

I think it varies on the quality of the providers, at least in AWS I've yet to come across something missing

But why not just Cloudformation then? What advantage does Terraform provide over Cloudformation in your opinion?