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Terraform Cloud Pricing Changes Sticker Shock

shavingtheyak.com

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Re: Terraform Cloud Pricing Changes Sticker Shock

#101
post #27

All these companies saw Snowflake's success and thought, "we want to use some kind of usage based pricing scheme to capture the value that we provide". Implicit in this thought process is that the price should scale in an unbounded way - if you're providing X value for a company with 10M revenue, you should be providing roughtly 1000X value to a company with 10B revenue. And it may be true that you are providing 1000…

The problem is that the value Terraform brings and the value Terraform cloud brings do not scale the same way. Hashicorp prices as if they did.

Re: Terraform Cloud Pricing Changes Sticker Shock

#103

Fun read, but sad in a way. The infrastructure and people that 'back end' your organization have value. This is intuitively true, but for the folks who are customer facing (and often senior management) there is often a minimization of that value. Open source really cut the cost of that back end, and reinforced the uninformed opinion that this stuff wasn't worth all that much. Once you're tied to a platform, because i…

> I'm not a fan of AI generated illustrations

Why not? I thought that the illustrations fit the article better than the bland and irrelevant stock photos people usually use.

As an aside: I figure that in about 3-4 years, no one will be able to assert that they do or don’t like AI generated art because there won’t be any way to know if it’s man made, machine made, or reality.

Re: Terraform Cloud Pricing Changes Sticker Shock

#104

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…

Honest question. If you need to pump data into datadog from your cloud, why not just stop doing that, and use the cloud tools? Datadog isnt' creating metrics. The metrics are already on your cloud provider (gcp,aws,etc) -- AND all these providers have ways to view metrics. Why do people pay 20k per month for data dog? They dont' want to use GCP metrics explorer? Same with TF cloud. You can just setup a jenkins job an…

For viewing, cloudwatch is simply nowhere as convenient, writing whole custom queries takes a lot of time, and setting up altering for just the right thing sometimes requires you to copy the complex result as another metric. Basically I can create a time-shifted difference of two metrics reporting at different intervals, smooth it and make it alert the right teams through slack and pagerduty in a minute or so (while getting a visual feedback on the query the whole time) - this would take a significant amount of time to do through the plain AWS process.

It's a bit like "you can write everything you want in assembler without the overhead of extra layers of X". Yeah, sure, I can. But I appreciate the extra layers of X. I'll take the right cost/convenience balance, like an adult, thank you.

Re: Terraform Cloud Pricing Changes Sticker Shock

#105
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At a prior company, we had a terraform slack channel, where people would post lock and unlock emojis and apply terraform manually. Obviously, it's not a perfect system, and it doesn't indefinitely scale, but it worked well enough.

How does this work? I thought the terraform state file was the single source of truth - if people are applying terraform 'manually' I assume that means on their local device? Are people sharing around the state file but don't have a central location for a lock file? Apologises if this seems obvious...

My assumption is that they're still using a remote backend for state, but they haven't set it up to use the locking features of the backend.

For example, I've use S3 as my Terraform backend for years, but I've never bothered to set up the locking feature, which uses DynamoDB.

In a small team that deploys Terraform changes rarely, you may never encounter the problems solved by using locking. Maybe good communication and a Slack channel works well enough for you.

Re: Terraform Cloud Pricing Changes Sticker Shock

#106
post #27

All these companies saw Snowflake's success and thought, "we want to use some kind of usage based pricing scheme to capture the value that we provide". Implicit in this thought process is that the price should scale in an unbounded way - if you're providing X value for a company with 10M revenue, you should be providing roughtly 1000X value to a company with 10B revenue. And it may be true that you are providing 1000…

Curious, how does Snowflake compare against Redshift, Trino, etc.?

Re: Terraform Cloud Pricing Changes Sticker Shock

#107
post #27

All these companies saw Snowflake's success and thought, "we want to use some kind of usage based pricing scheme to capture the value that we provide". Implicit in this thought process is that the price should scale in an unbounded way - if you're providing X value for a company with 10M revenue, you should be providing roughtly 1000X value to a company with 10B revenue. And it may be true that you are providing 1000…

"Value-based pricing" is a code word for "reach into your customers' pockets and steal the spare change". It's the end game of monopolists, actual or wanna-be, and it's a good way to burn literally all of your goodwill as quickly as possible.

Re: Terraform Cloud Pricing Changes Sticker Shock

#110
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…

https://www.nullstone.io/ (YC 23) is also a great option
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