Terraform does help with managing medium-large fleets, and a lot of special sauce is the structured types corresponding to cloud platforms (dubbed "providers") and the different services they offer. You could write your own configuration language and launcher but Terraform has been tested against many setups and can manage rolling restarts and other deployment methods. It's modular so you can define the configuration of a single server and then say "bring up 20 of these, use this docker image, name them thus," etc.
Vault for securely storing keys is also a convenient system component.
Both can be spun up in production without having to go through Hashicorp directly, but they also offer a service for managing the current state of the deployment (some aspects of the system are not queried at runtime and must be kept in a lock file of sorts, and coordinated with others doing any production changes). Some teams will coordinate using an S3 folder or some other ACL'd shared storage instead of relying on Hashicorp Cloud.
I find it's the closest thing to a public version of the service management tools I grew used to within Google, and it has been a driving force for the DevOps movement. I think something else could come along and do it better but it does seem like a lot of upkeep to retain parity with all the cloud services' products. I hope OpenTofu is successful, competition helps.
Yeah I know of Terraform (for me it was via AWS) but I just wonder how it's that valuable. For personal use, I never drank the koolaid on IaaS to begin with. Always found PaaS to be a nicer experience and I like that it actually simplifies DevOps, doesn't add complexity like an AWS or GCP does. I figure if I want more control over the server I can just use a Linux on-prem (no cost) or virtual server and I can fully control the machine - where IaaS like AWS/GCP just feel like expensive jargon hell with too many products. For a larger org sure, you need regional deployments, IAM, and some other stuff - but mostly stuff that is peripheral to code and its hardware requirements.
My favorite DevOps setup is my Raspberry Pi home server running Raspbian, love this thing - WiFi, touch screen so I can hold it like a mobile device or just set it down somewhere while it's serving several APIs, websites, etc. all the time including a local business in SF. Haven't stopped or restarted it in months.
I look at some of these big, old behemoths, and just don't get it. Take Oracle - when you really get into what they "do" it's like... oh... so, a database? Right now they offer clone services of the other cloud providers too, and some other things, but it's mostly just those huge consulting contracts. I just wonder how they get them (and at those rates) if not for relationships, it doesn't seem like their technology is particularly good.
Personally I run stuff like React sites on Vercel, backends on a mix of my Raspberry Pi and Heroku, and 1 thing still in GCP that I can't wait to port out of there. Still looking for a home for my LLMs. As an individual developer, I will probably embrace PaaS and convenience more and more with regards to DevOps, but yeah interesting to see where open-source Terraform goes - would be cool to see companies doing more customized infra internally instead of everyone using AWS.
Hashicorp didn’t make much money because they gave their products away and their professional services (tf cloud, vault enterprise etc.) are inferior or not enough of a value add over rolling your own.
Setting up a remote state in S3/Dynamo takes 5 minutes with a publicly available module and solves most of the problems TF cloud does.
Vault for securely storing keys is also a convenient system component.
Both can be spun up in production without having to go through Hashicorp directly, but they also offer a service for managing the current state of the deployment (some aspects of the system are not queried at runtime and must be kept in a lock file of sorts, and coordinated with others doing any production changes). Some teams will coordinate using an S3 folder or some other ACL'd shared storage instead of relying on Hashicorp Cloud.
I find it's the closest thing to a public version of the service management tools I grew used to within Google, and it has been a driving force for the DevOps movement. I think something else could come along and do it better but it does seem like a lot of upkeep to retain parity with all the cloud services' products. I hope OpenTofu is successful, competition helps.