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Comment by mathverse | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Except those same companies then run into hidden limits that exist on Terraform Cloud and hadn't been previously mentioned. Honestly, even bigger companies are better off going with Spacelift as it can scale extremely well, has reasonable support, and is much more feature rich.

As a disclaiming I'm currently writing a book on Terraform, and I've been interacting with a lot of the people in the space. Up until a few years ago I was a huge fan of Hashicorp, but their price changes and lack of support were what made it so I couldn't recommend Terraform Cloud anymore. The license changes they made were the icing on that cake.

You would think that, but having just went through trying to implement Terraform Cloud at work, its tools for doing anything that approaches behemoth deployment are abysmal. Permissions management is a nightmare and any sort of orchestration between different layers is barely there.

Then they should price them with smaller margins and make it up with volume.

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.

In particular think major regional non-technical companies, like grocery store chains or logistics companies or hospital networks. Beyond basic help desk support none of their IT is in-house and they don't want it to be in-house any more than an IT company wants to run an MRI machine for its employees, so they have dedicated a block of money to making that problem go away and don't really care how much it all costs as long as it comes in under that line.

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