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Terraform 0.12

hashicorp.com

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Re: Terraform 0.12

#101

Post by erik_seaberg »

maxaf wrote: post #49
_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.

Viewing Terraform solely through the lens of cloud automation and in comparison with CloudFormation is a shortsighted mistake. Terraform has providers for plenty of other services that don't qualify as "cloud things" and lack proper configuration of their own. In a very general sense, Terraform is a terrific resource management tool with state versioning & locking built in. For example, there's a terraform-kafka-prov…

I wish we could add providers by having terraform load python modules (or tcl, lua, js) and call it a day. Instead they chose to offer a statically-linked binary that forks gRPC plugin servers, and supporting that looks like a hell of a lot more work than writing and running a script.

Re: Terraform 0.12

#102

Post by zwischenzug »

ben0x539 wrote: post #99
marenkay wrote: post #98

As someone using Terraform from it's first release on I still think that Terraform has one fundamental flaw: It always looks at things using provider specific resource, while IMHO it should just expose a bunch of predefined resource types (see rOCCI specs e.g.) and then allow you to attach a specific provider to it. IMHO the biggest win as a user would be having not to have an implementation for every provider over a…

> The whole situation about state management is... lacking. Experience says the one thing no client ever wants in the cloud but always on prem is state. Hm, can you elaborate? S3 state seems perfectly serviceable, and I don't immediately see why I would want to operate on-prem resources just to maintain state.

Sec policies.

Re: Terraform 0.12

#104

Post by the_duke »

zbentley wrote: post #59
maxaf wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Viewing Terraform solely through the lens of cloud automation and in comparison with CloudFormation is a shortsighted mistake. Terraform has providers for plenty of other services that don't qualify as "cloud things" and lack proper configuration of their own. In a very general sense, Terraform is a terrific resource management tool with state versioning & locking built in. For example, there's a terraform-kafka-prov…

Someday folks will rediscover the potential of Puppet for these use cases. Until then, I'm content to watch countless alternative implementations come and go.

The nice thing about Terraform (and Ansible) imo is that they don't require a daemon but just run locally (or on CI), with some shared state in a object store.

Re: Terraform 0.12

#105

Post by crucialfelix »

ofrzeta wrote: post #69
tptacek wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, this is harsh, but there's a running joke that the big feature terraform is missing is a -twice flag so that it'll re-run itself on failure, since that's what you end up having to do anyways. Also, the terraform language, HCL? It's, I guess there's no better way to put this: not good. Am I misunderstanding the complexity of what Terraform is trying to do? To me, it looks like a bunch of tiny API clients tied…

Well, judging from the release notes, with for-loops you are now one step closer to a real programming language. Looks like the beginning of the end of the "declarative" paradigma which keeps people running their heads against the wall like this https://blog.gruntwork.io/terraform-tips-tricks-loops-if-sta...

Those are list / map comprehensions. So it's still declarative—you can't iterate and do anything while iterating. Only transform items in a list.

https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/hashicorp-terraform-0-12-prev...

Re: Terraform 0.12

#106

Post by crucialfelix »

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…

You can actually use JSON files in place of HCL: https://www.terraform.io/docs/configuration/syntax-json.html

main.tf.json

Re: Terraform 0.12

#107

Post by mellab2 »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #70
tptacek wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, this is harsh, but there's a running joke that the big feature terraform is missing is a -twice flag so that it'll re-run itself on failure, since that's what you end up having to do anyways. Also, the terraform language, HCL? It's, I guess there's no better way to put this: not good. Am I misunderstanding the complexity of what Terraform is trying to do? To me, it looks like a bunch of tiny API clients tied…

Well said. Its basically ANT for the cloud, in that its an annoyingly limited DSL with just enough power to work, but in a verbose and frustrating way. Speaking of real code (not YAML or HCL) as infrastructure, anyone have experience with Pulumi?

I've been using Pulumi for a few weeks now and it works pretty much exactly as advertised (for AWS at least). I am yet to run into any major hurdles and for any minor issues I have had the Pulumi team have been very responsive (they have a public Slack channel available).

It actually uses terraform's API's under the hood which is comforting in a way because you know it's building on a solid foundation.

I would not go back to writing HCL after experiencing Pulumi if I can avoid it, using a "real" programming language just feels a whole lot more natural and allows for much more powerful abstractions.

Re: Terraform 0.12

#108

Post by rsp1984 »

_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.

I'm an ex Googler and 2nd time founder of a company in the computer vision / robotics space and started hacking when I was 14. I'd consider myself pretty knowledgeable in my area -- yet, I must admit that I have absolutely no clue what Hashicorp and Terraform do and why everybody likes it.

I am very curious though. Would you mind explaining this from a high level (to someone who knows cloud technology about as well as your dog)?

Re: Terraform 0.12

#109

Post by slap_shot »

rsp1984 wrote: post #108
_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.

I'm an ex Googler and 2nd time founder of a company in the computer vision / robotics space and started hacking when I was 14. I'd consider myself pretty knowledgeable in my area -- yet, I must admit that I have absolutely no clue what Hashicorp and Terraform do and why everybody likes it. I am very curious though. Would you mind explaining this from a high level (to someone who knows cloud technology about as well a…

Just curious: what exactly about the description on the website is unclear?

> Provision and Manage any Infrastructure Use infrastructure as code to consistently provision any cloud, infrastructure, and service.

Re: Terraform 0.12

#110

Post by kkapelon »

doliveira wrote: post #96
kkapelon wrote: post #83

If you love terraform, please also look at Pulumi (I have no affiliation with them). https://pulumi.io/reference/vs/terraform.html https://github.com/pulumi/tf2pulumi

Honestly I like the idea of using declarative code for infra stuff because this way it becomes an inventory-like configuration language. There is a reason why YAML dominates today.

Terraform does not use YAML. And in the last updates they try to make their HCL more "programming language like". Pulumi is already there (they are using an actual programming language)
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