The Story of HashiCorp Terraform with Mitchell Hashimoto
I want to start by taking a step back to understand how we got here. And the story starts almost three years before we even began coding Terraform. In 2011, AWS introduced CloudFormation. The very next day I posted a blog post on Tumblr — yeah, Tumblr — saying how impressed I was with this idea. But what I thought we really needed was an open source, cloud-agnostic solution; a tool that could provide the same workflows, no matter what cloud you were using. And in this blog post I invited someone — anyone — to solve this problem. I basically gave the idea for Terraform away.
A few years passed, and this request I made in the blog post remained unanswered. Meanwhile, the challenges predicted became very real, and we needed a solution. So we decided to solve it ourselves and in July of 2014, we released Terraform 0.1, an open source, cloud-agnostic infrastructure as code solution — exactly the idea I presented in that blog post in 2011. Terraform 0.1 supported only AWS and DigitalOcean. The idea was to start there and extend this automated provisioning workflow to any infrastructure simply by adding a new provider for that specific piece of infrastructure.
Terraform was far from an overnight success. Downloads were mostly stagnant for the first 18 months. We even talked at one point about maybe shutting down the project. But we believed in what we built, and we felt that long term Terraform would live or die primarily based on the ecosystem we created around it: the providers it would support. And we knew that building this ecosystem required an active and vibrant open source community. So we focused on making Terraform providers easy to write, easy to use, and continuing to iterate on the core workflow to ensure it solved real world problems. By the end of 2016 — two and a half years after we initially released Terraform — we had over 750 contributors, and dozens of providers including Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, OpenStack, and more. Downloads started slowly, but were finally starting to tick up! They began doubling every month! Then in 2017, things really began to take off. This really felt like the "year of Terraform" to us. Downloads continued to double every single month!
