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Terraform Cloud Pricing Changes Sticker Shock

niblettc 3y ago
Can confirm. Had a good experience using Terraform Cloud on personal projects. Tried to bring it to my Big Co team but leadership / accounting couldn't get over the sticker shock from their resource based pricing. Azure DevOps does a good enough job for us.
foolfoolz 3y ago
they are copying the pulumi pricing which is insanely expensive as well. i don’t blame these companies for trying to make money but it’s one thing to codify the infrastructure. it’s another thing to pay for infrastructure as a service (on top of your iaas cloud) i think there’s only 2 paths forward: host your own (short term) and cloud providers will offer this for free / lower cost (long term) i think google and aws and the others will be strong at this in 5 years and will direct customers to iac more than clicking through a website. or simply offer better tools. the iac solutions today are just bandaids on poor user experiences in bigger products
- jen20 3y ago
  Just as a quick fact check there: Pulumi may have a similar pricing model, but if you're claiming that means HashiCorp copied the Pulumi pricing model, then you must also conclude that Pulumi copied the original HashiCorp pricing model. Resource-based pricing was the original pricing model for what is now Terraform Cloud (Atlas as-was).
api 3y ago
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 endless cycles in software and IT. Get ready for Harvard Business Review articles about how much someone saved exiting cloud.
- eastbound 3y ago
  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.
  - candiddevmike 3y ago
    GPU and data storage costs are driving folks back on premise, maybe not to the same scale as before yet, but when you already need a colo for these services... Might as well bring back compute too.
  - turminal 3y ago
    The "task" changes from time to time as well. Creating crazy new things, then figuring out they're too complex and then reinventing them simpler is another endless cycle, much older than software development itself.
  - addicted 3y ago
    It’s entirely possible that in-house offerings aren’t up to the task largely because the last 15 years have seen tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars invested in the idea that SAAS is cheaper and better? Now that the VC subsidy is over, and we’re into the gouge all those billions back from the people you’ve hooked onto your drug phase of the adoption cycle, it’s entirely possible some investors and technologists might see an opportunity in helping companies break out of that situation. So we may actually see some investment and effort in bringing in house tech up to par.
  - SteveNuts 3y ago
    Ahh but the big boy bare metal companies are catching up. Nutanix and the like can simplify on prem deployments and provide cloud-like experiences, though I admit nowhere nearly as polished yet.
  - freedomben 3y ago
    I disagree, there are great offerings out there. Open stack has stagnated a bit as things have radically shifted to the cloud, but it's still a good scalable and supported option. VMware also can get you pretty far. You can also go hybrid, and have the elastic scalability of cloud with the low cost of on-prem. Products like OpenShift can make this seamless to developers, and easy to manage and maintain.
jakozaur 3y ago
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: Spacelift, env0, Harness or Scalr.
- _joel 3y ago
  I would use opentofu but still waiting on cdktf https://github.com/opentofu/manifesto/issues/58 https://github.com/opentofu/manifesto/issues/58
  - candiddevmike 3y ago
    Why not use the HashiCorp one? It's still MPL and should remain compatible with OpenTofu...
    - technics256 3y ago
      At the hashi conf last month they started talking about adding terraform features that would only work on terraform cloud. It was very sad to see
    - _joel 3y ago
      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.
  - nikolay 3y ago
    Yet, HashiCorp does not support CDKTF natively in their commercial product! It puts very little effort into CDKTF as it doesn't make any extra revenue. The only reason they did it was to offer an alternative to Pulumi.
- 3y ago
saberience 3y ago
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 the same "willing to spend money range" as your monitoring or your main cloud hosting costs. I see these kind of tools as a tier below your monitoring tools like DataDog/Splunk etc. And these tools are a tier below your AWS/GCP costs. If your IAC or CI costs are approaching or overtaking your monitoring costs, something weird is afoot. Likewise, if your Datadog costs are approaching your AWS bill, this is obviously wrong. Hashicorp, in my opinion, thinks their tool is more mission-critical and more of a value-add than in reality it actually is, and I think they also don't understand that in the current high interest rate environment, companies are FAR more willing to put in engineering time to do migrations or money saving projects. My own company put in 100s of hours of Engineering time to reduce the Datadog bill by roughly 40-50%.
- mathverse 3y ago
  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.
  - candiddevmike 3y ago
    Then they should price them with smaller margins and make it up with volume.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      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.
pachico 3y ago
When they changed price from seats to resources we migrated to self managed
cube2222 3y ago
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 based around concurrency. Disclaimer: I work at Spacelift, but I do legitimately think it's a great product and recommend it. [0]: https://spacelift.io https://spacelift.io
- jeffwask 3y ago
  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.
  - cube2222 3y ago
    That's great to hear and thanks for the kind words!
- CubsFan1060 3y ago
  Is concurrency in this sense mostly just 'how many terraform plan/apply runs you have going at once?' Also, is the Enterprise plan significantly more expensive than the cloud plan?
  - cube2222 3y ago
    > Is concurrency in this sense mostly just 'how many terraform plan/apply runs you have going at once?' Yes, though not by minute, but by "max concurrency" over a month, with some room for bursts. > Also, is the Enterprise plan significantly more expensive than the cloud plan? It's quite a bit more expensive. I do recommend contacting our sales team[0] and presenting your use-case, though, to get more details. You can definitely work something out with them. [0]: https://spacelift.io/contact https://spacelift.io/contact
danw1979 3y ago
I’ve loved using Hashicorp products for many years but I have (despite often being in a position to do so) failed miserably to engage in any kind of commercial relationship with them. Their pricing has always been opaque. Despite trying my hardest, even multiple phone calls with their sales teams, I never got even a sniff of how much it would cost for enterprise deployments of Hashicorp products at any of my clients. I’m a shareholder in HCP and lost money on them after the IPO, so maybe I’m a bit sore, but I’m dumping my holdings soon. I’ve got no confidence this company actually knows how to sell into the bulk of the addressable market that they outlined in their S1. I think the growth they are currently generating will top out pretty soon when the shock of paying about the same for the management tools as the actual cloud services they are running hits home with their customers.
- baz00 3y ago
  I'll give you a clue: it's fucking expensive and their stuff creeps in everywhere.
- selfmodruntime 3y ago
  I can give an insight! We tried buying into Vault Enterprise and let me tell you, it was incredibly expensive. We're talking Splunk levels of prohibitive cost here, maybe even worse. Their pricing models are actually insane. For Vault Enterprise, you buy into a fixed limited number of clients with a pricing ladder that would make Apple blush. You start at 100 “service tokens” with the next level being 1000, 2500, and 50000 tokens. Any “service” that needs to connect to vault is a client, and the definition of a service is pretty loose. For Kubernetes / compose stacks, any one pod / running container is a service. It gets worse: Once a token has been claimed, it can no longer be used by a different client for the entire billing period (meaning: a year). This means that you can run out of valid client tokens, even if you're only actively using half if you spent the other half for testing purposes or no longer run the architecture that used up those tokens. Oh, and users are clients, too. All in all, the ballpark moved somewhere in the low six figures for their 100-token agreement, if I remember correctly. We had to decline because Vault alone would've cost a large part of our infrastructure budget.
  - 3y ago
s17n 3y ago
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 1000X the value! But that doesn't mean that you are going to be able to get away with charging 1000X the price when the cost of hiring a team to fully replace your product with something built in house is only 10X or 100X. Snowflake doesn't have this problem because very few companies could recreate Snowflake, period, much less recreate it for less than their Snowflake spend. But all these "hosted open source product" offerings should have realized by now that they need a ceiling on their pricing structure and/or they need to stop open sourcing their code.
- antisthenes 3y ago
  That's the biggest challenge - you can't capture all the value that you're providing your clients, otherwise there's 0 reason to use your product over either 1. Building it inhouse 2. Using someone who is capturing <100% of value provided. Then the only "moat" you have is lock-in, but clients tend to not like that, and you're squandering your reputational capital.
- marcinzm 3y ago
  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.
  - janejeon 3y ago
    This is a great point. I get that companies want to price their products in a way that they don't leave surplus value on the table (i.e. the more value a customer gets out of it, the more expensive the product gets), but the fundamental problem is that it's... so hard to actually "judge" the value that's being created by using the product in many cases. In such cases, probably for the best that companies err on the side of caution with some formula they're sure is below the actual value but isn't too far away.
echelon_musk 3y ago
Who is upvoting this blog spam from an account created 4hrs ago?
- bdcravens 3y ago
  While it's a bit unusual for a new account submitting only one site to have two posts on the front page, it seems to be a well-written article. I certainly appreciate fresh takes over someone submitting the same Paul Graham or Kalzumeus page that been submitted dozens of times, or over users who submit several times a day, every day (tosh, tomte, etc)
  - pvg 3y ago
    it seems to be a well-written article It's LLM-assisted/bloated fluff which it pretty much admits (with some more LLM-y fluff) right at the start https://shavingtheyak.com/2023/10/29/seo-generative-ai-and-the-future-of-web-content-my-predictions-october-2023/ https://shavingtheyak.com/2023/10/29/seo-generative-ai-and-t...
    - mjr00 3y ago
      The article you linked doesn't admit that at all. > I will use generative AI for ‘color’ content like pictures and icons due to factors like cost and time, but I don’t intend to use AI for anything else at all other than possibly helping me sort through ideas or summarizing pertinent information from overly long articles. TFA doesn't read like ChatGPT nonsense and it provides some interesting discussion. It looks like it's just a new technical blog someone created and is earnestly sharing with HN.
      - pvg 3y ago
        Read the linked post, it's completely generic and repetitive and 'possibly helping me sort through ideas' is doing a lot of lifting that the author obviously isn't. If you look around right now, it seems generative AI is all the rage. There is a growing pool of people now out there who: [bulleted list] Lets think about what generative AI can do right now and what this could mean for web content and organically generated search traffic going forward: Right now, generative AI can: [bulleted list] Lets take a look at the web for a second. Websites are what? Text. Images. Sometimes videos or music and sounds. Sometimes websites are dynamic and interactive, like web applications. All of these things can and will be created using generative AI. The use of generative AI to save time creating these things will increase exponentially over time. This is original writing the way trying to meet the word or page count for your middle school homework is original writing.
apienx 3y ago
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.
- campbel 3y ago
  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.
evantbyrne 3y ago
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 https://github.com/evantbyrne/terrarium
Dudester230602 3y ago
Don't read - there is AI art there.
- MooseBurger 3y ago
  oh no not AI art
- throitallaway 3y ago
  Are you boycotting articles with AI art? For any particular reason?
  - Dudester230602 3y ago
    The dude probably ChatGPT-ed the entire thing. I might as well ask those tools directly.
    - exponentialgenx 3y ago
      every word came from my own keyboard. It takes an hour or more to write a post and I don't have the time to hunt down the artwork - I lose enough sleep over my tech job, figured adding some fun art stuff would only be worth it if it didn't add to my stress - I do apologize if some folks are offended by using AI generated art though - I've created art myself in the past and the whole idea bugs me on a deep level, so I'm a bit conflicted on that
      - Dudester230602 3y ago
        Two options are acceptable for me personally: 1) "Crediting" the source models explicitly. 2) Generating away or cleaning up afterwards: incorrect spelling, hands with unnatural fingers, non-sensical devices/symbols etc.
        exponentialgenx 3y ago
        Thanks for this - I'm pretty new at blogging and it never occurred to me to credit the model. Next time I get on there I'll fix that.
coder543 3y ago
Was there actually a price increase recently and not 6 months ago? If people just want to vent about Hashicorp/Terraform, it seems like a text-post would be sufficient for that.
- pyrophane 3y ago
  It was announced a while back but the deadline to migrate to the new billing model is EOY.
  - coder543 3y ago
    Ok, that makes more sense, but if people haven't migrated away by now... the odds seem increasingly likely that they won't migrate in time to avoid that deadline.
figmert 3y ago
> I wouldn’t at all be surprised if someone creates a self-hosted clone of TFC This already exists[0]. Still in development but it looks promising. [0] https://github.com/leg100/otf https://github.com/leg100/otf
lawnchair 3y ago
Shameless plug: Co-founder of Terrateam[0] here. We have flat rate pricing with unlimited operations and users. Terraform Cloud pricing is absolutely crazy. [0]: https://terrateam.io https://terrateam.io
- nikolay 3y ago
  You don't seem to support monorepos, similarly to Atlantis and others, but a Terraform monorepo is a common practice, i.e. one PR could modify multiple workspaces.
wg0 3y ago
These all are the symptoms but not the cause and cause IMHO are as under which is an industry wide culture (of waste, pride in that waste) and practice that is hailed and seen as the only rather best and recommended way to do things: - Investor driven companies that are waiting a 10x return on their money in 10 years at max or less. Or else. - Microservices - where every one instead of collaborating on a single monolithic app is needlessly invested in microservice systems that result in software components that are "loosely coupled", have no transactional guarantees, can't go more than one caller down in depth thus can't be stacked on top of each other. - The DevOps movement: Developers are also operators. So now you need such controls and products (kinder garden if you will) where developers can provision infrastructure for the microservices at will that they came up with (along with a cool name, could be some star wars, star, galaxy or greek mythology - anything goes, a peasant shouldn't be able to decipher the reference if any is the point) For the one above, you definitely can build certain types of tools without tons of venture capital or at least command line tools can go that way even if they have a web interface. For second, highly disputed and controversial - the jury is out. But I think most (and please pay attention to most) companies and business domains can do without microservices.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
notnmeyer 3y ago
been using terraform with atlantis for years and years at this point. highly recommend it.
npalli 3y ago
The era of startups charging below fair price (to deliver the service) in pursuit of "growth" comes to an end. This was the end game for lot of these companies working in the ZIRP environment from 2009-21. Underprice your service, lock in customers to your service, hope it will be too difficult to migrate away, when dust settles jack up prices to reach fair value, of course if everything fails, sell to a large company who will not have a problem enforcing. We will begin to see waves of these re-pricings as VC funded subsidies comes to a close.
- aenis 3y ago
  Maybe. Or maybe the price of passing the cost of internal bloat to the customer is coming to an end? Look at their gross vs net margin. Where is the money spent? How much engineers vs. non engineers do they employ? Did they acquire naming rights to a stadium? My company was just hit by an egregious 6.5x price increase from one of those managed open source companies. A cool $7m per year delta. We will feel sore for a year, since we were told 2 months in advance of the new pricing, and we will migrate off it easily for the demonstrable ROI. I didnt even need to ask the C suite for the migration money, they were so pissed.
nikolay 3y ago
Now we have to pay for every single GitHub issue label, for every single Terrarform Workspace tag, etc., which we manage with Terraform. Basically, their pricing forces people to do more stuff outside of Terraform and incentivices ClickOps. I'm no longer going to use TFC as there are plenty of open-source alternatives! We have no choice but to pay this year although we're looking to get rid of TFC and evaluating competitors. I don't like their TFC Stacks feature, which is also patent-pending. They limit Terraform so that you must pay to get your problems solved with TFC. It's a nasty scheme that will cost them dearly! They are like Docker as a company. Vault now has a bunch of competition as well.
arandomhuman 3y ago
Just use Atlantis, it’s really great. My company switched from Terraform Cloud to maintaining an Atlantis instance and it made things so much smoother, and it’s OSS. https://www.runatlantis.io/ https://www.runatlantis.io/
- deadlike 3y ago
  Maybe I'm missing something but although Atlantis seems great, you have to expose a webhook to the open internet that points to a service that has full admin access to your infra. If an attacker finds a security issue with Atlantis and decides to abuse it, you've basically given them admin access. For that exact reason Atlantis a prime target for vulnerability exploitation
  - hiatus 3y ago
    You can put it behind something like cloudflare and make the url something that can't be guessed, but yeah it is not the best. I really wish github would publish a list of IPs it calls from.
ChuckMcM 3y ago
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 it's "cost effective", that platform can then say, "Okay, now it's time to start charging you for the real value we provide." That leaves the operations folks going to management saying "Hey our costs are going way up, kthxbye" And usually starts an uncomfortable education cycle where the real cost of running the business gets penciled out. Sometimes it kills companies. The <thing><as a service> provider gets to set pretty much an arbitrary price on their value. If you have followed the saga of Music you know that the "labels" who hold all the copyrights (generally) always win at keeping all the money for themselves and thus kill business after business that would help the artists. This as-a-service(AAS) companies can do the same thing. It's one of the interesting things for me about 0xide and making 'on prem' a thing again. It feels like another shift is coming and this is a preview of what the motivations for the shift will be. And lastly I'm not a fan of AI generated illustrations in a blog post.
- mysterypie 3y ago
  > 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.
  - ChuckMcM 3y ago
    I'm going to disagree, it will be trivial in 3-4 years to recognize that no one blogging is going to make enough money from blogging to pay a human artist to do illustrations. :-)
nikolay 3y ago
Open-source TFC alternatives: - https://hatchet.run/ https://hatchet.run/ - https://docs.otf.ninja/latest/ https://docs.otf.ninja/latest/ - https://www.digger.dev/ https://www.digger.dev/ - https://terrakube.org/ https://terrakube.org/ - https://www.runatlantis.io/ https://www.runatlantis.io/
rr808 3y ago
Meanwhile my dumb corporate employer is still moving perfectly good internal applications from our data center to AWS. Productivity is tanking.
johnthreevolts 3y ago
Can some one tell what with other tools from their stack? Consul, Nomad?
oldfolks 3y ago
Just use cloudformation
- DandyDev 3y ago
  Please don’t take this advice as gospel. Cloudformation has a few problems: - it only lets you manage AWS resources. And even if you’re not running multi-cloud, you’re bound to have a bunch of non-AWS resources like a DB vendor somewhere that you want to put on IaC as well - it’s slow as molasses - even if you feel HCL is bad, it will probably not be as bad as the huge swathes of YAML/JSON Cloudformation has you write - despite what the console makes you believe, drift detection is practically non existent
_cenw 3y ago
I managed my Cloudflare "zonefile" (mix of manual records and flags, but ends up with 50+ resources per domain) with Terraform Cloud when this change was announced. Very shitty that a managed kubernetes cluster and a domain record can supposedly be boiled down to the same value now. My state is in S3 + Dynamo DB now.

Can confirm. Had a good experience using Terraform Cloud on personal projects. Tried to bring it to my Big Co team but leadership / accounting couldn't get over the sticker shock from their resource based pricing. Azure DevOps does a good enough job for us.

foolfoolz 3y ago

they are copying the pulumi pricing which is insanely expensive as well. i don’t blame these companies for trying to make money but it’s one thing to codify the infrastructure. it’s another thing to pay for infrastructure as a service (on top of your iaas cloud) i think there’s only 2 paths forward: host your own (short term) and cloud providers will offer this for free / lower cost (long term) i think google and aws and the others will be strong at this in 5 years and will direct customers to iac more than clicking through a website. or simply offer better tools. the iac solutions today are just bandaids on poor user experiences in bigger products

jen20 3y ago
Just as a quick fact check there: Pulumi may have a similar pricing model, but if you're claiming that means HashiCorp copied the Pulumi pricing model, then you must also conclude that Pulumi copied the original HashiCorp pricing model. Resource-based pricing was the original pricing model for what is now Terraform Cloud (Atlas as-was).

api 3y ago

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 endless cycles in software and IT. Get ready for Harvard Business Review articles about how much someone saved exiting cloud.

eastbound 3y ago
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.
- candiddevmike 3y ago
  GPU and data storage costs are driving folks back on premise, maybe not to the same scale as before yet, but when you already need a colo for these services... Might as well bring back compute too.
- turminal 3y ago
  The "task" changes from time to time as well. Creating crazy new things, then figuring out they're too complex and then reinventing them simpler is another endless cycle, much older than software development itself.
- addicted 3y ago
  It’s entirely possible that in-house offerings aren’t up to the task largely because the last 15 years have seen tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars invested in the idea that SAAS is cheaper and better? Now that the VC subsidy is over, and we’re into the gouge all those billions back from the people you’ve hooked onto your drug phase of the adoption cycle, it’s entirely possible some investors and technologists might see an opportunity in helping companies break out of that situation. So we may actually see some investment and effort in bringing in house tech up to par.
- SteveNuts 3y ago
  Ahh but the big boy bare metal companies are catching up. Nutanix and the like can simplify on prem deployments and provide cloud-like experiences, though I admit nowhere nearly as polished yet.
- freedomben 3y ago
  I disagree, there are great offerings out there. Open stack has stagnated a bit as things have radically shifted to the cloud, but it's still a good scalable and supported option. VMware also can get you pretty far. You can also go hybrid, and have the elastic scalability of cloud with the low cost of on-prem. Products like OpenShift can make this seamless to developers, and easy to manage and maintain.

jakozaur 3y ago

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: Spacelift, env0, Harness or Scalr.

_joel 3y ago
I would use opentofu but still waiting on cdktf https://github.com/opentofu/manifesto/issues/58 https://github.com/opentofu/manifesto/issues/58
- candiddevmike 3y ago
  Why not use the HashiCorp one? It's still MPL and should remain compatible with OpenTofu...
  - technics256 3y ago
    At the hashi conf last month they started talking about adding terraform features that would only work on terraform cloud. It was very sad to see
  - _joel 3y ago
    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.
- nikolay 3y ago
  Yet, HashiCorp does not support CDKTF natively in their commercial product! It puts very little effort into CDKTF as it doesn't make any extra revenue. The only reason they did it was to offer an alternative to Pulumi.
3y ago

saberience 3y ago

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 the same "willing to spend money range" as your monitoring or your main cloud hosting costs. I see these kind of tools as a tier below your monitoring tools like DataDog/Splunk etc. And these tools are a tier below your AWS/GCP costs. If your IAC or CI costs are approaching or overtaking your monitoring costs, something weird is afoot. Likewise, if your Datadog costs are approaching your AWS bill, this is obviously wrong. Hashicorp, in my opinion, thinks their tool is more mission-critical and more of a value-add than in reality it actually is, and I think they also don't understand that in the current high interest rate environment, companies are FAR more willing to put in engineering time to do migrations or money saving projects. My own company put in 100s of hours of Engineering time to reduce the Datadog bill by roughly 40-50%.

mathverse 3y ago
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.
- candiddevmike 3y ago
  Then they should price them with smaller margins and make it up with volume.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    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.

pachico 3y ago

When they changed price from seats to resources we migrated to self managed

cube2222 3y ago

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 based around concurrency. Disclaimer: I work at Spacelift, but I do legitimately think it's a great product and recommend it. [0]: https://spacelift.io https://spacelift.io

jeffwask 3y ago
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.
- cube2222 3y ago
  That's great to hear and thanks for the kind words!
CubsFan1060 3y ago
Is concurrency in this sense mostly just 'how many terraform plan/apply runs you have going at once?' Also, is the Enterprise plan significantly more expensive than the cloud plan?
- cube2222 3y ago
  > Is concurrency in this sense mostly just 'how many terraform plan/apply runs you have going at once?' Yes, though not by minute, but by "max concurrency" over a month, with some room for bursts. > Also, is the Enterprise plan significantly more expensive than the cloud plan? It's quite a bit more expensive. I do recommend contacting our sales team[0] and presenting your use-case, though, to get more details. You can definitely work something out with them. [0]: https://spacelift.io/contact https://spacelift.io/contact

danw1979 3y ago

I’ve loved using Hashicorp products for many years but I have (despite often being in a position to do so) failed miserably to engage in any kind of commercial relationship with them. Their pricing has always been opaque. Despite trying my hardest, even multiple phone calls with their sales teams, I never got even a sniff of how much it would cost for enterprise deployments of Hashicorp products at any of my clients. I’m a shareholder in HCP and lost money on them after the IPO, so maybe I’m a bit sore, but I’m dumping my holdings soon. I’ve got no confidence this company actually knows how to sell into the bulk of the addressable market that they outlined in their S1. I think the growth they are currently generating will top out pretty soon when the shock of paying about the same for the management tools as the actual cloud services they are running hits home with their customers.

baz00 3y ago
I'll give you a clue: it's fucking expensive and their stuff creeps in everywhere.
selfmodruntime 3y ago
I can give an insight! We tried buying into Vault Enterprise and let me tell you, it was incredibly expensive. We're talking Splunk levels of prohibitive cost here, maybe even worse. Their pricing models are actually insane. For Vault Enterprise, you buy into a fixed limited number of clients with a pricing ladder that would make Apple blush. You start at 100 “service tokens” with the next level being 1000, 2500, and 50000 tokens. Any “service” that needs to connect to vault is a client, and the definition of a service is pretty loose. For Kubernetes / compose stacks, any one pod / running container is a service. It gets worse: Once a token has been claimed, it can no longer be used by a different client for the entire billing period (meaning: a year). This means that you can run out of valid client tokens, even if you're only actively using half if you spent the other half for testing purposes or no longer run the architecture that used up those tokens. Oh, and users are clients, too. All in all, the ballpark moved somewhere in the low six figures for their 100-token agreement, if I remember correctly. We had to decline because Vault alone would've cost a large part of our infrastructure budget.
- 3y ago

s17n 3y ago

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 1000X the value! But that doesn't mean that you are going to be able to get away with charging 1000X the price when the cost of hiring a team to fully replace your product with something built in house is only 10X or 100X. Snowflake doesn't have this problem because very few companies could recreate Snowflake, period, much less recreate it for less than their Snowflake spend. But all these "hosted open source product" offerings should have realized by now that they need a ceiling on their pricing structure and/or they need to stop open sourcing their code.

antisthenes 3y ago
That's the biggest challenge - you can't capture all the value that you're providing your clients, otherwise there's 0 reason to use your product over either 1. Building it inhouse 2. Using someone who is capturing <100% of value provided. Then the only "moat" you have is lock-in, but clients tend to not like that, and you're squandering your reputational capital.
marcinzm 3y ago
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.
- janejeon 3y ago
  This is a great point. I get that companies want to price their products in a way that they don't leave surplus value on the table (i.e. the more value a customer gets out of it, the more expensive the product gets), but the fundamental problem is that it's... so hard to actually "judge" the value that's being created by using the product in many cases. In such cases, probably for the best that companies err on the side of caution with some formula they're sure is below the actual value but isn't too far away.

echelon_musk 3y ago

Who is upvoting this blog spam from an account created 4hrs ago?

bdcravens 3y ago
While it's a bit unusual for a new account submitting only one site to have two posts on the front page, it seems to be a well-written article. I certainly appreciate fresh takes over someone submitting the same Paul Graham or Kalzumeus page that been submitted dozens of times, or over users who submit several times a day, every day (tosh, tomte, etc)
- pvg 3y ago
  it seems to be a well-written article It's LLM-assisted/bloated fluff which it pretty much admits (with some more LLM-y fluff) right at the start https://shavingtheyak.com/2023/10/29/seo-generative-ai-and-the-future-of-web-content-my-predictions-october-2023/ https://shavingtheyak.com/2023/10/29/seo-generative-ai-and-t...
  - mjr00 3y ago
    The article you linked doesn't admit that at all. > I will use generative AI for ‘color’ content like pictures and icons due to factors like cost and time, but I don’t intend to use AI for anything else at all other than possibly helping me sort through ideas or summarizing pertinent information from overly long articles. TFA doesn't read like ChatGPT nonsense and it provides some interesting discussion. It looks like it's just a new technical blog someone created and is earnestly sharing with HN.
    - pvg 3y ago
      Read the linked post, it's completely generic and repetitive and 'possibly helping me sort through ideas' is doing a lot of lifting that the author obviously isn't. If you look around right now, it seems generative AI is all the rage. There is a growing pool of people now out there who: [bulleted list] Lets think about what generative AI can do right now and what this could mean for web content and organically generated search traffic going forward: Right now, generative AI can: [bulleted list] Lets take a look at the web for a second. Websites are what? Text. Images. Sometimes videos or music and sounds. Sometimes websites are dynamic and interactive, like web applications. All of these things can and will be created using generative AI. The use of generative AI to save time creating these things will increase exponentially over time. This is original writing the way trying to meet the word or page count for your middle school homework is original writing.

apienx 3y ago

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.

campbel 3y ago
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.

evantbyrne 3y ago

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 https://github.com/evantbyrne/terrarium

Dudester230602 3y ago

Don't read - there is AI art there.

MooseBurger 3y ago
oh no not AI art
throitallaway 3y ago
Are you boycotting articles with AI art? For any particular reason?
- Dudester230602 3y ago
  The dude probably ChatGPT-ed the entire thing. I might as well ask those tools directly.
  - exponentialgenx 3y ago
    every word came from my own keyboard. It takes an hour or more to write a post and I don't have the time to hunt down the artwork - I lose enough sleep over my tech job, figured adding some fun art stuff would only be worth it if it didn't add to my stress - I do apologize if some folks are offended by using AI generated art though - I've created art myself in the past and the whole idea bugs me on a deep level, so I'm a bit conflicted on that
    - Dudester230602 3y ago
      Two options are acceptable for me personally: 1) "Crediting" the source models explicitly. 2) Generating away or cleaning up afterwards: incorrect spelling, hands with unnatural fingers, non-sensical devices/symbols etc.
      - exponentialgenx 3y ago
        Thanks for this - I'm pretty new at blogging and it never occurred to me to credit the model. Next time I get on there I'll fix that.

coder543 3y ago

Was there actually a price increase recently and not 6 months ago? If people just want to vent about Hashicorp/Terraform, it seems like a text-post would be sufficient for that.

pyrophane 3y ago
It was announced a while back but the deadline to migrate to the new billing model is EOY.
- coder543 3y ago
  Ok, that makes more sense, but if people haven't migrated away by now... the odds seem increasingly likely that they won't migrate in time to avoid that deadline.

figmert 3y ago

> I wouldn’t at all be surprised if someone creates a self-hosted clone of TFC This already exists[0]. Still in development but it looks promising. [0] https://github.com/leg100/otf https://github.com/leg100/otf

lawnchair 3y ago

Shameless plug: Co-founder of Terrateam[0] here. We have flat rate pricing with unlimited operations and users. Terraform Cloud pricing is absolutely crazy. [0]: https://terrateam.io https://terrateam.io

nikolay 3y ago
You don't seem to support monorepos, similarly to Atlantis and others, but a Terraform monorepo is a common practice, i.e. one PR could modify multiple workspaces.

wg0 3y ago

These all are the symptoms but not the cause and cause IMHO are as under which is an industry wide culture (of waste, pride in that waste) and practice that is hailed and seen as the only rather best and recommended way to do things: - Investor driven companies that are waiting a 10x return on their money in 10 years at max or less. Or else. - Microservices - where every one instead of collaborating on a single monolithic app is needlessly invested in microservice systems that result in software components that are "loosely coupled", have no transactional guarantees, can't go more than one caller down in depth thus can't be stacked on top of each other. - The DevOps movement: Developers are also operators. So now you need such controls and products (kinder garden if you will) where developers can provision infrastructure for the microservices at will that they came up with (along with a cool name, could be some star wars, star, galaxy or greek mythology - anything goes, a peasant shouldn't be able to decipher the reference if any is the point) For the one above, you definitely can build certain types of tools without tons of venture capital or at least command line tools can go that way even if they have a web interface. For second, highly disputed and controversial - the jury is out. But I think most (and please pay attention to most) companies and business domains can do without microservices.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

notnmeyer 3y ago

been using terraform with atlantis for years and years at this point. highly recommend it.

npalli 3y ago

The era of startups charging below fair price (to deliver the service) in pursuit of "growth" comes to an end. This was the end game for lot of these companies working in the ZIRP environment from 2009-21. Underprice your service, lock in customers to your service, hope it will be too difficult to migrate away, when dust settles jack up prices to reach fair value, of course if everything fails, sell to a large company who will not have a problem enforcing. We will begin to see waves of these re-pricings as VC funded subsidies comes to a close.

aenis 3y ago
Maybe. Or maybe the price of passing the cost of internal bloat to the customer is coming to an end? Look at their gross vs net margin. Where is the money spent? How much engineers vs. non engineers do they employ? Did they acquire naming rights to a stadium? My company was just hit by an egregious 6.5x price increase from one of those managed open source companies. A cool $7m per year delta. We will feel sore for a year, since we were told 2 months in advance of the new pricing, and we will migrate off it easily for the demonstrable ROI. I didnt even need to ask the C suite for the migration money, they were so pissed.

nikolay 3y ago

Now we have to pay for every single GitHub issue label, for every single Terrarform Workspace tag, etc., which we manage with Terraform. Basically, their pricing forces people to do more stuff outside of Terraform and incentivices ClickOps. I'm no longer going to use TFC as there are plenty of open-source alternatives! We have no choice but to pay this year although we're looking to get rid of TFC and evaluating competitors. I don't like their TFC Stacks feature, which is also patent-pending. They limit Terraform so that you must pay to get your problems solved with TFC. It's a nasty scheme that will cost them dearly! They are like Docker as a company. Vault now has a bunch of competition as well.

arandomhuman 3y ago

Just use Atlantis, it’s really great. My company switched from Terraform Cloud to maintaining an Atlantis instance and it made things so much smoother, and it’s OSS. https://www.runatlantis.io/ https://www.runatlantis.io/

deadlike 3y ago
Maybe I'm missing something but although Atlantis seems great, you have to expose a webhook to the open internet that points to a service that has full admin access to your infra. If an attacker finds a security issue with Atlantis and decides to abuse it, you've basically given them admin access. For that exact reason Atlantis a prime target for vulnerability exploitation
- hiatus 3y ago
  You can put it behind something like cloudflare and make the url something that can't be guessed, but yeah it is not the best. I really wish github would publish a list of IPs it calls from.

ChuckMcM 3y ago

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 it's "cost effective", that platform can then say, "Okay, now it's time to start charging you for the real value we provide." That leaves the operations folks going to management saying "Hey our costs are going way up, kthxbye" And usually starts an uncomfortable education cycle where the real cost of running the business gets penciled out. Sometimes it kills companies. The <thing><as a service> provider gets to set pretty much an arbitrary price on their value. If you have followed the saga of Music you know that the "labels" who hold all the copyrights (generally) always win at keeping all the money for themselves and thus kill business after business that would help the artists. This as-a-service(AAS) companies can do the same thing. It's one of the interesting things for me about 0xide and making 'on prem' a thing again. It feels like another shift is coming and this is a preview of what the motivations for the shift will be. And lastly I'm not a fan of AI generated illustrations in a blog post.

mysterypie 3y ago
> 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.
- ChuckMcM 3y ago
  I'm going to disagree, it will be trivial in 3-4 years to recognize that no one blogging is going to make enough money from blogging to pay a human artist to do illustrations. :-)

nikolay 3y ago

Open-source TFC alternatives: - https://hatchet.run/ https://hatchet.run/ - https://docs.otf.ninja/latest/ https://docs.otf.ninja/latest/ - https://www.digger.dev/ https://www.digger.dev/ - https://terrakube.org/ https://terrakube.org/ - https://www.runatlantis.io/ https://www.runatlantis.io/

rr808 3y ago

Meanwhile my dumb corporate employer is still moving perfectly good internal applications from our data center to AWS. Productivity is tanking.

johnthreevolts 3y ago

Can some one tell what with other tools from their stack? Consul, Nomad?

oldfolks 3y ago

Just use cloudformation

DandyDev 3y ago
Please don’t take this advice as gospel. Cloudformation has a few problems: - it only lets you manage AWS resources. And even if you’re not running multi-cloud, you’re bound to have a bunch of non-AWS resources like a DB vendor somewhere that you want to put on IaC as well - it’s slow as molasses - even if you feel HCL is bad, it will probably not be as bad as the huge swathes of YAML/JSON Cloudformation has you write - despite what the console makes you believe, drift detection is practically non existent

_cenw 3y ago

I managed my Cloudflare "zonefile" (mix of manual records and flags, but ends up with 50+ resources per domain) with Terraform Cloud when this change was announced. Very shitty that a managed kubernetes cluster and a domain record can supposedly be boiled down to the same value now. My state is in S3 + Dynamo DB now.