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Terraform 0.12

hashicorp.com

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Re: Terraform 0.12

#21

Post by techntoke »

_t0du wrote: post #15

I honestly love Terraform as a product. It was one of probably three tools I've used in my entire career that made me feel immediately more productive. After using it for a very short period of time I was shocked developers continued to struggle through CF templates and the fragility the whole process entailed.

Agreed about CF. AWS puts a huge emphasis on CloudFormation when they know it is sub-par. Ansible is pretty cool too because you can easily convert between YAML/JSON for CF, and add a lot of flexibility based on variables and other things such as error handling that you can't do with Terraform.

Re: Terraform 0.12

#22

Post by james_s_tayler »

techntoke wrote: post #19

I moved away from Terraform a long time ago. Ansible was way more powerful, handled errors and issues with state changes. Terraform was super picky about how you had to operate, slow and HCL was a terrible markup language. I wasn't really a huge fan of Ansible either though and more recently have been doing things in regular shell/Bash scripts. Now with Kubernetes and service brokers, there is no need for Terraform.

What about setting up and tearing down EKS clusters? I haven't used terraform but I learned about it through looking at this:

https://learn.hashicorp.com/terraform/aws/eks-intro

So, I'd say Kubernetes itself does more heavy lifting but not all of it?

Re: Terraform 0.12

#23

Post by kitotik »

techntoke wrote: post #19

I moved away from Terraform a long time ago. Ansible was way more powerful, handled errors and issues with state changes. Terraform was super picky about how you had to operate, slow and HCL was a terrible markup language. I wasn't really a huge fan of Ansible either though and more recently have been doing things in regular shell/Bash scripts. Now with Kubernetes and service brokers, there is no need for Terraform.

While there is certainly overlap, these products are trying to solve different problems.

Ansible seems to focus on managing infrastructure, Terraform shines when creating infrastructure.

Re: Terraform 0.12

#24

Post by haolez »

_t0du wrote: post #15

I honestly love Terraform as a product. It was one of probably three tools I've used in my entire career that made me feel immediately more productive. After using it for a very short period of time I was shocked developers continued to struggle through CF templates and the fragility the whole process entailed.

When working solely on AWS, I prefer CloudFormation, since I feel it's easier to organize my deployments into CloudFormation Stacks.

Re: Terraform 0.12

#25

Post by kitotik »

merlincorey wrote: post #13
EdwardDiego wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically Terraform is cloud agnostic, so you can (theoretically) define something in Terraform and then use it on AWS, or GCP, or Azure.

That's not at all how it works. Terraform supports each of those providers, but the resources are specific to each provider. You cannot use the same Terraform configuration on AWS and Azure. Nor would you want to, per se. As far as I know, this is by design.

You can’t share provider-specific resources across providers of course, but you can absolutely share other configuration data across providers. I find it extremely useful - for example it’s fairly trivial to bounce between scaleway, AWS, DO, Vultr, etc.

Re: Terraform 0.12

#26

Post by tedk-42 »

techntoke wrote: post #20
EdwardDiego wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair criticism, I've never used it, just what I've picked up from their marketing material.

> Basically Terraform is cloud agnostic, so you can (theoretically) define something in Terraform and then use it on AWS, or GCP, or Azure. > Fair criticism, I've never used it, just what I've picked up from their marketing material. LOL, why'd you even comment? You are making statements based on marketing material? Microsoft is probably hiring people like you if you're looking for a job.

Bahahahaha spot on.

Re: Terraform 0.12

#27

Post by kitotik »

kawsper wrote: post #9
bshacklett wrote: post #3

My biggest hope is that this means that some effort can be directed back to fixing bugs. I love what terraform can do, but I hate what I sometimes need to write to make it work. Also, I'll go out on a limb and say that I dislike the flexibility of iteration allowed in HCL 2. I know that people overwhelmingly asked for it, but my opinion is that it demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of how the v. 11 and earli…

The biggest issue we have with Terraform (and other Hashicorp tools in general, really) is their different configuration formats, but mostly it is HCL limitations. I haven't found a solution for it, but I have lots of resources that are almost identical, except for a few arguments, but right now it seems like my options are to either write my own Ruby script to output .hcl files, or live with two resources that are a…

How does a var, template, or even a generic resource that runs a local script not solve this problem?

Re: Terraform 0.12

#28

Post by n42 »

Congratulations to the team for a monumental release! The significance of the changes involved to ship 0.12 seems understated. This release paves the path to implement many highly requested features and fixes. Most noteworthy of which, in my opinion, is module counts.

Re: Terraform 0.12

#29

Post by SlowRobotAhead »

pensatoio wrote: post #16
SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #5

I’m a little unclear on terraform in practice. As you supposed to download this, use it’s language and syntax which is all it’s own thing, to define you services and then export that to a YAML setup that AWS CloudFormation (for example) is expecting? I assume there are reasons I wouldn’t just define it myself in YAML directly?

As others have said, no exporting is involved. You write roughly-json-esque code which you then apply to a cloud provider. The state of the infrastructure is stored, ideally, in the cloud. You apply your code during which terraform identifies which changes need to be made by comparing the current state with your local changes and executes those changes as you watch. The end result is well-defined, testable, repeatabl…

>Infrastructure as code. Store it in git. Profit.

Ok. But so is CloudFormation YAML files, mostly.

So is the advantage of Teraform that it works beyond AWS?

Re: Terraform 0.12

#30

Post by sandGorgon »

kraig wrote: post #4
bshacklett wrote: post #3

My biggest hope is that this means that some effort can be directed back to fixing bugs. I love what terraform can do, but I hate what I sometimes need to write to make it work. Also, I'll go out on a limb and say that I dislike the flexibility of iteration allowed in HCL 2. I know that people overwhelmingly asked for it, but my opinion is that it demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of how the v. 11 and earli…

IMO they should have dumped HCL once they caught a whiff of what Pulumi is up to, much rather go with actual languages that when you learn them, you pick up some valued knowledge. You can also do a whole lot more with Typescript than you can with HCL 2.

+1 on Pulumi.

It's a bit disconcerting when one of the BIG aspects of the Terraform 0.12 release is some support for preliminary types.

Pulumi just uses Typescript.

I'm not entirely sure why Terraform is going in the direction of reinventing the wheel when it can leverage stuff out there.

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