HashiCorp Terraform vs. SUSE Manager

8 because it's currently best-in-class and is completely essential to use in contrast to not expressing your infrastructure as code. That said, new contenders are nipping at its heels, and I expect stronger tools to emerge in the coming years. Hopefully the Terraform team is able to keep pace.

Incentivized

In our specific use case, SUSE Manager is extremely useful. We're having a large landscape that is divided into intake, development, quality and production with a couple of different SUSE flavours that need to be automatically rolled out, configured, patched and maintained, everything from up to date repositories that are cloned on a daily basis straight from SUSE.

Incentivized

• Terraform is cloud agnostic. Just select the suitable provider for the cloud and it will do the job.
• Templating is possible to make the Terraform templates reusable.
• Variables can be created to make the templates generic so that it can be reused for different environments or resources.

Incentivized

• Manage the content lifecycle of our products over multiple environments.
• Use salt to its fullest extent, including pre-generated states that make installation and configuration very easy.
• Manage repositories.
• Make it easy to audit our own infrastructure.
• Make it easy to bootstrap new systems.

Incentivized

• The errors generated by the plan and preview commands are pretty cryptic, it can be hard for newcomers to the scripting language to understand how to address problems.
• Access controls around workspaces is limited which makes it harder to secure reduce the scope of teams ability.
• Analytics around user usage, applies and plans would be helpful for managemenet.

Incentivized

• The cloning of patches when using the content lifecycle module in a multi-environment landscape with many SLES flavours is a bit cumbersome.
• More premade saltstate for default applications are always nice to have.
• Upgrading SUMA could be easier, especially when a Postgres upgrade is also required.

Incentivized

I am expanding the use of SUSE Manager throughout our organization and can't imagine going back to the "wild wild west" we had before.

I love Terraform and I think it has done some great things for people that are working to automate their provisioning processes and also for those that are in the process of moving to the cloud or managing cloud resources. There are some quirks to HCL that take a little bit of getting used to and give picking up Terraform a little bit of a learning curve, thus the rating

Incentivized

The gui is extremely user friendly. The installation and configuration does have a learning curve, it takes a while to set everything up. But once you're passed this initial learning curve, everything is very intuitive. If you want extra automation, there's an api (eventough i personally find the documentation of the api could be ordered better). I gave this product a 9 because of the initial learning curve and the api documentation, but for the rest it suits my needs perfectly.

Incentivized

Terraform's performance is quite amazing when it comes to deployment of resources in AWS. Of course, the deployment times depend on various parameters like the number of resources to deploy and different regions to deploy. Terraform cannot control that. The only minor drawback probably shows up when a terraform job is terminated mid way. Then in many cases, time-consuming manual cleanup is required.

Incentivized

Terraform is community driven but does offer support for it's Enterprise product. When contacting the team at HashiCorp we have always gotten resolution to our issues. They have been very responsive in returning our calls and answering our questions as they come up. We are currently using the open source model.

Incentivized

SUSE Manager provided a top-tier support person on site to us for two days to help integration. We did all the standard stuff they help with before he arrived. We were able to use him to get all the tricky stuff identified and solved in the short time we had. Had they sent us a lower-tier guy, it would have been a waste. I was impressed they sent such knowledgeable person.

dbt was fine, but you end up with an extremely bloated repo/project. Often where all of the models are the same, named similarly, and generally just doesn't adhere to the concept of DRY coding. In Terraform we're able to template a lot of this work and dynamically generate assets based on variables instead.

Incentivized

The other competitors also have a good platform and service, but we went with SUSE due to cost. The price was best and we needed to keep under a certain budget. The functionality was perfect for what we needed so we took the step forward. This allows us to manage our Linux environment within the manager and update or deploy specific tasks to each as needed.

Incentivized

• Using code, we are able to build and deploy cloud resources faster and more consistently than producing the same resources in the console manually.
• For applications that share architectures, we can reuse code to expedite development. We can also do the same with modules that are shared across the organization.
• By defining all of our resources as code, we can deploy complete environments with "batteries included." For example, we can use code that spins up servers in a cloud provider and at the same time, creates monitors with in our monitoring provider. Likewise, when the servers are decommissioned, the monitors are decommed along with them. In the past, the creation and decom of the monitors would have been a disjointed, manual step. With Terraform we get it all with one "terraform apply."

Incentivized

• Manages patch levels for most Linux OS by: date, group, cloud or custom channels
• Make it easy to audit our own infrastructure.
• Allows the joining of groups inside SUSE Manager to quickly access or work with servers so grouped.
• 24/7 support team.
• Automatic deployment.

Incentivized