Used For

• +**Your developers wait 2 weeks for new environments because IT provisions everything manually** → Write Terraform files once, spin up identical environments in 20 minutes
• +**Database passwords are hardcoded everywhere and you had a security scare** → Vault generates temporary credentials that expire automatically
• +**Microservices can't find each other and your app is down 20% of the time** → Consul automatically tracks healthy services and encrypts traffic between them
• +**You're managing servers across 3 cloud providers with different interfaces** → One set of config files works everywhere
• +Handles 1,000+ cloud providers with the same syntax - no learning AWS CloudFormation AND Azure ARM templates

Best For

• >Your team keeps breaking production because someone clicked the wrong button in the cloud console
• >Managing infrastructure across multiple clouds is eating 20+ hours per week
• >You're tired of explaining to your CEO why spinning up a new environment takes 3 weeks

Not For

• -Solo developers or teams under 50 people — the learning curve takes weeks and you won't see ROI until you have serious scale
• -Companies wanting point-and-click simplicity — this requires writing code and understanding infrastructure concepts
• -Anyone hoping for instant results — expect 2-4 weeks to get comfortable and 1-3 months before you're production-ready

Pairs With

• *AWS/Azure/Google Cloud (the actual infrastructure that HashiCorp provisions and manages)
• *Kubernetes (where Nomad schedules containers or Consul handles service discovery)
• *Git (where you store all your infrastructure code and track changes)
• *Slack (where you get notifications when Terraform runs succeed or fail spectacularly)
• *Datadog (to monitor the infrastructure that Terraform built)
• *GitHub Actions (to automatically run Terraform when you push code changes)
• *PostgreSQL (one of many databases that Vault can generate temporary credentials for)

The Catch

• !The free open-source version is great until you need enterprise features, then you're looking at $50k+ per year
• !Terraform state files can get corrupted and lock your entire team out of deployments for hours
• !Learning HCL syntax and infrastructure concepts takes most developers 2-4 weeks, not the 'minutes' the marketing suggests

Bottom Line

Turns your cloud setup into code so you can stop manually clicking through AWS consoles at 2am when things break.