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Terraform 0.15 General Availability

hashicorp.com

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Re: Terraform 0.15 General Availability

#11

Post by mitchellh »

llbeansandrice wrote: post #2

Perhaps off-topic but how have people upgraded TF codebases to new versions? Just last year we had a big effort to upgrade a huge code-base from 0.11 to 0.12. I feel like it should be a lot smoother than a full-team full-sprint effort.

I'm one of the HashiCorp founders.

Terraform 0.11 to 0.12 is by far the most difficult of the versions to upgrade between. I am really sorry about that. The other upgrades should be relatively minor as long as you read and follow the upgrade guides and upgrade one minor version at a time (0.11 => .12 => .13 etc.). There are rough edges for very specific cases but most of our customers were able to upgrade from 0.12 to subsequent versions same day without issue.

Breaking changes and difficult upgrades is not something we want to do with Terraform (0.12 being a big exception as that was a very core "reset" so to speak). The reason there have been these changes in these recent releases is that we've been ensuring Terraform is in a place for 1.0 that we don't have to have difficult upgrades.

You can see this path happening in each release:

- Terraform 0.15: state file format stability

- Terraform 0.14: provider dependency lock file

- Terraform 0.13: required provider block (for more deterministic providers)

- Terraform 0.12: stable JSON formats for plans/config parsing/etc. (particularly useful for interop with things like Terraform Cloud and 3rd party tooling)

This was all done to lead up to a stable 1.0 release.

As noted in the blog post, 0.15 is effectively a 1.0 pre-release so if everything goes well, we've MADE IT. For 1.0, we'll be outlining a number of very detailed compatibility promises which will make upgrades much easier going forward. :)

Re: Terraform 0.15 General Availability

#12

Post by jasonvorhe »

llbeansandrice wrote: post #2

Perhaps off-topic but how have people upgraded TF codebases to new versions? Just last year we had a big effort to upgrade a huge code-base from 0.11 to 0.12. I feel like it should be a lot smoother than a full-team full-sprint effort.

terraform 0.1xupgrade went pretty smoothly most of the time, with some minor manual changes and fixes here and there. Most of them were easily done in batch over the repository using sed.

This approach worked for me in various setups from a small SaaS company to a major travel company as well as personal projects without issues.

Re: Terraform 0.15 General Availability

#13

Post by llbeansandrice »

scottsuch wrote: post #4
llbeansandrice wrote: post #2

Perhaps off-topic but how have people upgraded TF codebases to new versions? Just last year we had a big effort to upgrade a huge code-base from 0.11 to 0.12. I feel like it should be a lot smoother than a full-team full-sprint effort.

Our team just did a big effort to get from 11 to 12. After that the effort was quite minimal. Some little gotchas re: providers in 13 but we're just today finished the 14 upgrade and will probably let 15 marinate until we upgrade to that.

I think we're dealing with the providers now as we get warnings on 0.12.29 that they'll be deprecated in 13 so nice to know that we're over the biggest hill.

Re: Terraform 0.15 General Availability

#14

Post by llbeansandrice »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #6
llbeansandrice wrote: post #2

Perhaps off-topic but how have people upgraded TF codebases to new versions? Just last year we had a big effort to upgrade a huge code-base from 0.11 to 0.12. I feel like it should be a lot smoother than a full-team full-sprint effort.

Someone not in our team upgraded version by mistake from 0.12 to 0.13 (he was contributing something small and used the latest), the CTO got involved and made us update everything and it was a big undertaking. Personally I have a nix shell file pinned to the exact version of terraform (as in, commit hash on the nix-packages repo) we use in every repo and just switch to that shell before doing anything.

We had this issue as well where another team was on 0.12 and we were still on 11 and even running a plan I think could ruin the state.

We now have all of the systems tf version pinned:

``` terraform { required_version = "= 0.12.29" ... } ```

As other said tfenv let's you easily switch between versions but you don't get a warning if you're accidentally on 0.12 but the repo is currently using something else.

Re: Terraform 0.15 General Availability

#15

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

toyg wrote: post #10
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a fan of tfenv for this; it's really easy to use and makes it trivial to pin each stack to an exact version of TF.

Between rbenv, tfenv, pyenv, sdkman and so on and so forth, maybe it's time for some sort of common OS-level env-management interface...?

That is a selling point of nix and docker, yes:) The catch is that doing it generically makes the whole thing more complicated (although I suspect nix and docker are more complex than is strictly required for that use case)

Re: Terraform 0.15 General Availability

#16

Post by uglygoblin »

llbeansandrice wrote: post #2

Perhaps off-topic but how have people upgraded TF codebases to new versions? Just last year we had a big effort to upgrade a huge code-base from 0.11 to 0.12. I feel like it should be a lot smoother than a full-team full-sprint effort.

I started using Terraform on our project in early 2019 which was version 0.11.13. The upgrade to 0.12.x seemed non-trivial so I put it off... now 2 years later and we're at 0.15.x.

Looks like I need to clear my schedule in a upcoming sprint to get this done so the pain doesn't get even worse :)

Re: Terraform 0.15 General Availability

#17

Post by llbeansandrice »

mitchellh wrote: post #11
llbeansandrice wrote: post #2

Perhaps off-topic but how have people upgraded TF codebases to new versions? Just last year we had a big effort to upgrade a huge code-base from 0.11 to 0.12. I feel like it should be a lot smoother than a full-team full-sprint effort.

I'm one of the HashiCorp founders. Terraform 0.11 to 0.12 is by far the most difficult of the versions to upgrade between. I am really sorry about that. The other upgrades should be relatively minor as long as you read and follow the upgrade guides and upgrade one minor version at a time (0.11 => .12 => .13 etc.). There are rough edges for very specific cases but most of our customers were able to upgrade from 0.12 t…

Thanks, good to know that the upgrade to 12 is the biggest jump.

Re: Terraform 0.15 General Availability

#18

Post by dxxvi »

My tiny brain still don't get why people like terraform. Do people need to look at both terraform docs and aws/azure/gcp docs when writing a .tf file? The fact that terraform saves/remembers the resource states is like a double-edged sword: we cannot manually fix some minor mistakes of ours when creating resources because that'll mess up terraform

Re: Terraform 0.15 General Availability

#19

Post by dastx »

mohsen0 wrote: post #5
llbeansandrice wrote: post #2

Perhaps off-topic but how have people upgraded TF codebases to new versions? Just last year we had a big effort to upgrade a huge code-base from 0.11 to 0.12. I feel like it should be a lot smoother than a full-team full-sprint effort.

It becomes much easier between other versions. Though upgrading 0.12 to 0.13 I remember, i had to pull the state and change the provider field manually to avoid recreation of some resources.

> i had to pull the state and change the provider field manually to avoid recreation of some resources.

Terraform CLI introduced an upgrade command (can't remember what it's called) that automatically does this for you.

Re: Terraform 0.15 General Availability

#20

Post by verdverm »

dxxvi wrote: post #18

My tiny brain still don't get why people like terraform. Do people need to look at both terraform docs and aws/azure/gcp docs when writing a .tf file? The fact that terraform saves/remembers the resource states is like a double-edged sword: we cannot manually fix some minor mistakes of ours when creating resources because that'll mess up terraform

A manual fix requires a git commit, as most use Terraform with GitOps and IaC.

The point of using TF for many is reproducible infra and change approval workflows. So avoiding manual changes via the web consoles is what people are striving for.

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