Terraforming 1Password

The video is a bit slow because it's meant to be instructional. There are other videos on the same page which show how the model (graph) can be viewed logically instead of isometrically (what we call spatially).

I'm the CTO, happy to answer questions.

To respond to some specific items mentioned in this post:

- "Terraform has a more straightforward and powerful language (HCL) that makes it easier to write and review code."

It's easy to pipe configuration through your favorite 'straightforward and powerful' templating language of choice to generate the stack template used by CloudFormation. I definitely wouldn't use CloudFormation at all without an extra preprocessing step of some sort.

- "Terraform has another gem of a feature that we rely on: terraform plan. It allows us to visualize the changes that will happen to the environment without performing them."

CloudFormation has a similar feature called "Change Sets" (released in March 2016).

Finally, two more things to note:

- CloudFormation supports "Custom Resources", which allow you to write Lambda-function scripts to perform any custom operation you want (e.g., interact with third-party APIs, or support new AWS resources that don't yet have an official CloudFormation resource implementation). There's not as extensive a library of providers Terraform supports, but you can often find open-source providers to fill the gaps on AWS resource until an official implementation is released. And if not, you can just write a quick and dirty implementation yourself. Terraform supports a similar feature in "Custom Providers", but they are Go-only as opposed to the various supports Lambda-language runtimes.

- CloudFormation and all official AWS-resource implementations not only have excellent public documentation but are officially supported by AWS Support, which is a big deal if you're deploying something with any degree of complexity or cost/risk.

As for Terraform's strengths: its extensive set of resource providers beyond AWS ecosystem can't be beat. Also, it has great support for mapping existing infrastructure resources, which is a feature still sorely lacking in CloudFormation. (I'm surprised the author of this post didn't take advantage of this for their migration to avoid downtime!)

Given a bit of time with Terraform, the need for modules becomes obvious as you identify common resources for the infrastructure you're modeling. I thought writing modules first was the "right way," but starting with modules ended up being a waste.

Yes, this has been known to happen, here is one example: https://stackoverflow.com/a/42142791/2518355 - this AWS feature was added Sep 21 2016, Terraform resource released support on May 11 2017, CloudFormation resource released support on Jun 6 2017.

However, several points should be added to this comparison:

- CloudFormation supports Custom Resources so you can always implement new AWS features yourself with a few lines of JavaScript, without waiting for the official resource implementation to be published. - CloudFormation resources have extensive documentation, and are officially maintained + supported by AWS.

I don't see any mention of Terraform Enterprise here, either. I imagine they're perfectly capable of pursuing Terraform with the foss version, although the enterprise complement has some pretty great additional features.