141–150 of 167 posts
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> 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.
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.
Currently Terraform Enterprise is the only approach to solving that and its a good one but... only if you're one of the big guns and even those sometimes think twice because the infrastructure state requires much more security than that offers.
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.
this is short-sighted. Terraform and CloudFormation are not even in the same league. One of them works and actually can be used for Infrastructure as Code, the other one does not roll back in the face of failure - it effectively craps for reasons ranging from network failure, process crash, even normal operation. One is heavy kool-aid with bugs that go unresolved for years, the other behaves as advertised. Sorry, but…
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Cloudformation will leave your infrastructure in a consistent state. Period. It will consistently drive things from point A to point B or rollback to point A if it cannot get to B. It will also correctly remember all the resources it created and allow you to properly identify them and/or delete them. These sound like tablestakes but Terraform cannot do this. Add the frustrations of HCL on top and it’s a big no go for…
I've had CloudFormation fail to roll back plenty of times, though never in a situation where it actually mattered. I've never had Terraform "forget" resources or disallow me from deleting them (unless I requested that). Maybe those are bugs that've since been fixed? It sounds like we've had very different experiences with these tools.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
S3 is Amazon. In some cases you want to exert control over your state without being dependent on external parties. Currently Terraform Enterprise is the only approach to solving that and its a good one but... only if you're one of the big guns and even those sometimes think twice because the infrastructure state requires much more security than that offers.
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…
They both have their drawbacks, Terraform obviously suffers from not being a first-class service to AWS (since their service CloudFormation is a direct competitor). It is also possible to accidentally discard your Cloud "state" file, that keeps track of every instance that already exists and its current state (so TF can do a "diff" on what is there vs. what you're trying to apply), which definitely causes some headaches. In my experience the benefits of the design decisions from the tool far far outweigh any of the cons.
On the contrary, I have never had a good experience with CloudFormation. The workflow is long/slow, some of the AWS Best Practices are hilariously bad (looking at you "Paste this entire Python file as a text string into a yaml file), and more than a few times have I gotten into a state where CF-generated instances cannot be deleted and require the intervention of an AWS Rep.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Hence it's meaningless to me.
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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…
Both CloudFormation and Terraform are tools that allow a dev to define Cloud Resources (databases, networks, permissions, instances, all that) as code/markup, and then run those markup files through their respective engines (CloudFormation or Terraform) and have those resources get created/modified/whatever. They both have their drawbacks, Terraform obviously suffers from not being a first-class service to AWS (since…
But HCL is giving me Puppet DSL PTSD.
Folks at Hashicorp should just embed JS engine and let users write definitions using a real language (JS).
It's totally doable using library such-as Otto.