<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>maxaf</author><text>Viewing Terraform solely through the lens of cloud automation and in comparison with CloudFormation is a shortsighted mistake. Terraform has providers for plenty of other services that don&amp;#x27;t qualify as &amp;quot;cloud things&amp;quot; and lack proper configuration of their own. In a very general sense, Terraform is a terrific resource management tool with state versioning &amp;amp; locking built in. For example, there&amp;#x27;s a terraform-kafka-provider[1], which can be used to manage topics in a Kafka cluster. Could shell scripts be written to accomplish the same goal? Of course. Would those scripts inevitably develop in a haphazard, organic way to form a buggy and incomplete implementation of something like Terraform? You bet!&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Cloud&amp;quot; configuration may have been Terraform&amp;#x27;s proverbial toe in water, but the truly untapped potential lies in the other providers. Anything that can be packaged as a Terraform provider exposing resource abstractions can be easily managed using convenient HCL syntax. This, IMHO, is the unfortunately buried lede.&lt;p&gt;[1]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;Mongey&amp;#x2F;terraform-provider-kafka&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;Mongey&amp;#x2F;terraform-provider-kafka&lt;/a&gt;</text><parent_chain><item><author>_t0du</author><text>I honestly love Terraform as a product. It was one of probably three tools I&amp;#x27;ve used in my entire career that made me feel immediately more productive.  After using it for a very short period of time I was shocked developers continued to struggle through CF templates and the fragility the whole process entailed.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Terraform 0.12</title><url>https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/announcing-terraform-0-12</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>mirceal</author><text>this is short-sighted. Terraform and CloudFormation are not even in the same league. One of them works and actually can be used for Infrastructure as Code, the other one does not roll back in the face of failure - it effectively craps for reasons ranging from network failure, process crash, even normal operation.  
 One is heavy kool-aid with bugs that go unresolved for years, the other behaves as advertised.&lt;p&gt;Sorry, but I have yet to meet a developer that used Terraform and willingly wants to keep using it after seeing it fail. When your tool cannot keep track of the resources it created or when it gets into situations where it doesn’t allow you to do certain things (like deleting all resources created) and you have to relearn how the underlying cloud works, it’s time to move on.&lt;p&gt;Do yourselves a favor and use Cloudformation (or your favorite cloud’s equivalent and just move on with your life)</text><parent_chain><item><author>_t0du</author><text>I honestly love Terraform as a product. It was one of probably three tools I&amp;#x27;ve used in my entire career that made me feel immediately more productive.  After using it for a very short period of time I was shocked developers continued to struggle through CF templates and the fragility the whole process entailed.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Terraform 0.12</title><url>https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/announcing-terraform-0-12</url></story>