Personally I'd much rather see a GUI that can help string together snippets of Terraform/CFN and Ansible/Chef/Puppet/Salt/whathaveyou. A visual IDE for infrastructure automation, if you will.
So the idea is that you would choose your changes in the GUI, but instead of actually changing the target, it spits out the required code to do it for you in a repeatable way? I would definitely find that useful for Terraform and Cloudformation. Searching for it, I see that AWS has a tool targeted at that: Cloudformation Designer. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-cloudformation-desi... https://docs.aws.amazon…
For example: you have Puppet, Chef, Ansible, Salt, etc. They can all make a directory. They do exactly the same thing on almost all systems they support, because POSIX.
They literally all just run this syscall: int mkdir(const char pathname, mode_t mode);.
But each tool has their own goofy way of being told to make the directory. Why can't I just pass "{'mkdir': [ '/the/path/name', '0700' ]}" to all of them? This is literally all they will be doing, and all they need to know. Just make this path with this permission. This is declarative programming, without a custom language!
Anything else, like directory ownership, should be an extra object, like "{'chown': [ '/the/path/name', '1000', '1000' ] }". Again, this is literally called the same way everywhere: int chown(const char pathname, uid_t owner, gid_t group);.
You can combine the two into one JSON blob in the output of this config management tool (that's what this GUI really is - a GUI CM with a dashboard). You can have sets of blobs with tags that are discrete reusable pieces of configuration. And every tool can just read them, follow a spec based on POSIX, and execute them.
