| --- |
| page_title: Terraform vs. Custom Solutions |
| description: >- |
| Why Terraform is easier to use and maintain than custom, internal |
| infrastructure solutions. |
| --- |
| |
| # Terraform vs. Custom Solutions |
| |
| 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. |
| |
| These tools require time and resources to build and maintain. |
| As tools of necessity, they represent the minimum viable |
| features needed by an organization, being built to handle only |
| the immediate needs. As a result, they are often hard |
| to extend and difficult to maintain. Because the tooling must be |
| updated in lockstep with any new features or infrastructure, |
| it becomes the limiting factor for how quickly the infrastructure |
| can evolve. |
| |
| Terraform is designed to tackle these challenges. It provides a simple, |
| unified syntax, allowing almost any resource to be managed without |
| learning new tooling. By capturing all the resources required, the |
| dependencies between them can be resolved automatically so that operators |
| do not need to remember and reason about them. Removing the burden |
| of building the tool allows operators to focus on their infrastructure |
| and not the tooling. |
| |
| Furthermore, Terraform is an open source tool. In addition to |
| HashiCorp, the community around Terraform helps to extend its features, |
| fix bugs and document new use cases. Terraform helps solve a problem |
| that exists in every organization and provides a standard that can |
| be adopted to avoid reinventing the wheel between and within organizations. |
| Its open source nature ensures it will be around in the long term. |
