Our strategic move to use Terraform
By Gabriel Hakvoort
Our Cloud Platform, also known as our Landing Zone solution, was initially built on Bicep. Bicep is great for deploying Azure resources, which helped us grow our standardized solution fast, with quick time to market for our customers. However, we are now longing for even more automation and more complex deployments, which got us thinking about using Bicep.
Our Cloud Platform, also known as our Landing Zone solution, was initially built on Bicep. Bicep is great for deploying Azure resources, which helped us grow our standardized solution fast, with quick time to market for our customers. However, we are now longing for even more automation and more complex deployments, which got us thinking about using Bicep.
Beside orchestrating deployments to Azure resource managed, Bicep is not able to deploy to other platforms like EntraID, Azure Devops and others. So began our hunt for a new language that fits our purpose.
When thinking about languages for Infrastructure as Code, there are a few that come to mind; Bicep, Terraform and Pulumi. Bicep was our baseline, which we knew a lot about already. Terraform has a great track record when it comes to Infrastructure as Code, with a large community and a lot of providers for different platforms/solutions. Pulumi is a .NET type of language that uses Terraform wrappers for the deployments.
Looking at market share of each of the language, we have concluded that Terraform has the biggest market share. Bicep and Terraform are both declarative languages, which would help us in adapting to this new language faster. It also helps that we have customers, and potential customers, ask for a Terraform version of our Landing Zone solution. Based on these reasons, we have decided to verify that Terraform can help us grow in the automation and platform requirements we have determined.
After investigating thoroughly, we have found out that Terraform is a great fit for our vision and plans and it would enable us to grow our solution even further. Along with the fact that the learning curve is not as steep as learning any other language, we have made the decision to go for Terraform over any other option.
Additionally, our colleagues at other Xebia service lines also have a multitude of experience using Terraform, which enables us to get help in growing our standardized solution quickly.
For you, as our valued customers, this means that we will be able to enable your teams even quicker and with more functionality, so they can focus on bringing business value to your company. If you are currently using our Bicep version of the Landing Zone solution, we will get in contact with you to plan a migration to the Terraform version.
