Should I use ARM Templates or something like Terraform for my environment? | One Ops Question

We are back answering your question about operation in a cloud\hybrid environment.  This week, Zachary Deptawa answers a question we've been getting a lot lately.

"Should I use Azure Resource Manager Templates or something like Terraform for my environment?"

[arieheinrich]

Terraform is NOT cloud agnostic. Having the ability to deploy to multiple clouds because of cloud providers doesn't make it cloud agnostic. Cloud agnostic means you create ONE set of files and deploy the same files to any cloud you want and that will never happen because each cloud provider has their own schema / api which is basically the reason terraform was created in the first place, to avoid every company having to track the changing APIs in the could/s they are using and then fix their code again and again, and rather rely on the cloud provider to adapt new functionality the serivce has added/changes. Not even Pulumi (based on terraform) is cloud agnostic, even with their implementation of the pulumi cloud provider. There is no s3 bucket resource in azure for example, it has a different name, different properties, different parameters and different schema. The day all clouds will use a open source schema / API to describe infrastructure, is the day we wont really need terraform but rather one unified API/CLI tool to be invoked and passed parameters.