If your only comparison is "I used to work with Heroku", Terraform might seem not great. I would argue this is a blub example, in that this person's lens does not contain enough context or experience to be able to assess value.

Terraform's value becomes clear when moving in scenarios like moving from CloudFormation to Terraform, or when trying to integrate a second cloud's resources into your infrastructure workflow. Without experience in anything other than Heroku, of course a tool designed to do many many things is going to seem complex and at times frustrating.

> Iteration times are way longer than with even mobile apps. Like, “you’re liable to task-switch while waiting to see plan output” longer.

I'm over here laughing in my "over an hour of CloudFormation only to have a run fail, and then a rollback fail, and have to contact AWS support" life.

> I'm over here laughing in my "over an hour of CloudFormation only to have a run fail, and then a rollback fail, and have to contact AWS support" life.

Heh, same. Any of the cloud-provided orchestration tools (Cloudformation, Openstack Heat etc.) are great only for the most basic tasks; using them to provision complex infrastructure is just begging for a world of hurt.

That being said. I think terraform could do better. I use terraform a lot, and yet I agree with the authors complaints that the syntax can be super confusing, is not documented very well, and the providers have their own idiosyncrasies. The last one isn't strictly an issue with terraform, its with the provider implementation. But... if terraform aims to be the Swiss army knife of infrastructure provisioning, I think criticism that its hard to standardize even within the same provider is fair.

> Any of the cloud-provided orchestration tools (Cloudformation, Openstack Heat etc.) are great only for the most basic tasks; using them to provision complex infrastructure is just begging for a world of hurt.

It's also fun when you have to standardize something that was either created by hand in the Web UI (and has a bunch of hidden default values set), or was by some other orchestration tool, and then you have to import/recreate it in terraform. It's usually a PITA, but you'll learn a lot!