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Terraform Cloud Pricing Changes Sticker Shock

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Re: Terraform Cloud Pricing Changes Sticker Shock

#31

Post by noirbot »

mathverse wrote: post #9
saberience wrote: post #6

Terraform Cloud costs are an absolute joke. I was actually the decision maker a couple of years ago when we chose our IAC stack and decided not to go with Terraform Cloud despite thinking the product is strong, and it was entirely due to the business model and cost. For us (and I'm guessing for many VC funded companies), SAAS managed IAC is a nice to have, but certainly not a MUST-have and certainly not something in…

I think Terraform Cloud (and most Hashi's enterprise offerings) aim at absolutel behemoths of deployments with many, many infra teams where the complexity comes from scale and the companies are not Google or Facebook and therefore this problem can't be solved through talent. For many such enterprises it's easier to throw money at the problem.

You would think that, but having just went through trying to implement Terraform Cloud at work, its tools for doing anything that approaches behemoth deployment are abysmal. Permissions management is a nightmare and any sort of orchestration between different layers is barely there.

Re: Terraform Cloud Pricing Changes Sticker Shock

#32

Post by bandrami »

ghaff wrote: post #18
candiddevmike wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then they should price them with smaller margins and make it up with volume.

Although it's certainly not always the right strategy, it's certainly a valid strategy to serve a smaller number of relatively price-insensitive customers (and provide them with ancillary services/high-touch sales/etc. that they want). The fact that you may not personally be on the market for that sort of thing doesn't mean there isn't a market.

In particular think major regional non-technical companies, like grocery store chains or logistics companies or hospital networks. Beyond basic help desk support none of their IT is in-house and they don't want it to be in-house any more than an IT company wants to run an MRI machine for its employees, so they have dedicated a block of money to making that problem go away and don't really care how much it all costs as long as it comes in under that line.

Re: Terraform Cloud Pricing Changes Sticker Shock

#34

Post by apienx »

There are a few fast-growing and very profitable companies building products that do nothing but “abstract” TFC.

Inertia is stronger than we think. Large corps would rather pay more than move to another (cheaper) solution. The downside is asymmetrical (and catastrophically so), so no CTO or CEO would take such risks.

Re: Terraform Cloud Pricing Changes Sticker Shock

#35

Post by cube2222 »

jeffwask wrote: post #28
cube2222 wrote: post #22

Kind of a shameless plug but it's hard not to with such a title. Make sure to check out Spacelift[0]. It’s a CI/CD specialized in Infra as Code. Terraform/OpenTofu are first-class citizens and it brings advanced customizability with cross-statefile dependencies, OPA-policies (not just for access control, but e.g. customizing your gitops flow) and others. The pricing is reasonable, too, and not per-resource. Generally…

I second this shameless plug and I'm about to be a 2 time spacelift purchaser. I did the same dance with Hashicorp a few years ago which led to a product shoot out and Spacelift won easily. That was before it also handled Kubernettes and Ansible.

That's great to hear and thanks for the kind words!

Re: Terraform Cloud Pricing Changes Sticker Shock

#36

Post by fweimer »

jakozaur wrote: post #5

Hashicorp is one of the extreme examples. Terraform Cloud is an okay product at best, which went from expensive to very expensive. Moreover, they aggressively changed the Terraform license from open-source to BSL. So after the whole community contributed a lot of providers, they want to profit from that. You should use OpenTofu and buy IAC from one of the companies sponsoring full-time engineers on that project: Spac…

In all fairness, the Terraform provider registry has always been clearly proprietary, prohibiting commercial use by default:

> You may download or copy the Content (and other items displayed on the Services for download) for personal non-commercial use only

https://web.archive.org/web/20201106225027/https://registry....

Re: Terraform Cloud Pricing Changes Sticker Shock

#37

Post by bandrami »

eastbound wrote: post #11
api wrote: post #4

ZIRP is over and SaaS is entrenched. Prepare for a LOT more rug pulling and price gouging. The labor and capital cost savings for moving to the cloud and SaaS were to get you there and get you dependent. Now that you don’t have in house IT anymore it’s time to turn the screws. You will soon be paying 2-3X what self hosted internal IT cost. The the pendulum will start to swing the other way. This is one of those endle…

It never really swings back the other way. It slows down adoption but we’ll never see large back-in-house IT projects. Because in-house offerings (and open-source) aren’t up to the task anymore.

In-house IT isn't up to the task of building systems that are infinitely scalable but as the price goes up lots and lots of shops are going to realize they don't need infinitely scalable, they need the scale they're at and have no reason to want to grow it. In-house IT is great at that.

Re: Terraform Cloud Pricing Changes Sticker Shock

#38

Post by campbel »

apienx wrote: post #34

There are a few fast-growing and very profitable companies building products that do nothing but “abstract” TFC. Inertia is stronger than we think. Large corps would rather pay more than move to another (cheaper) solution. The downside is asymmetrical (and catastrophically so), so no CTO or CEO would take such risks.

In my experience in big-co, the decision makers on something like TF are going to be constrained by cost. They'll be picking between many different tools and they are incentivized to provide as much value as possible.

Re: Terraform Cloud Pricing Changes Sticker Shock

#39

Post by _joel »

candiddevmike wrote: post #13
_joel wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would use opentofu but still waiting on cdktf https://github.com/opentofu/manifesto/issues/58

Why not use the HashiCorp one? It's still MPL and should remain compatible with OpenTofu...

Sure, could do, just that I'd rather ensure that compatibility remains rather than retool on opentofu (admit that's not a big deal currently whilst in parity) and have some compatibility drift in the future. Would rather wait and see if there's a more unified solution.

Re: Terraform Cloud Pricing Changes Sticker Shock

#40

Post by evantbyrne »

Shameless OSS plug time. I made a small utility many years ago to solve the Terraform state problem in CI by using a file in S3 with a expiration timestamp as a locking mechanism. Obviously this only scratches the surface of what Terraform Cloud does, but might be enough for many teams. Feel free to fork it for your own purposes: https://github.com/evantbyrne/terrarium
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