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Terraform 1.0

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Re: Terraform 1.0

#21

Post by marenkay »

pizza234 wrote: post #15
hnlmorg wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the biggest problem is that the state file is a JSON blob who's hierarchy directly maps the structure of your code in Terraform. This makes refactoring a nightmare as you're continually having to fudge the state file and/or declare that a resource defined in code relates to a resource defined in state (I forget the exact CLI flag you pass to do this off hand).

Yes, I think is reflected into our situation. For our TF codebase, specifically, it would be greate to deduplicate modules (which is something that couldn't be done some time ago), but there is no simple way of, say, creating a new module, and slowly migrate resources into it. In particular (AFAIK), there are no tools for moving stuff around, so in addition to the TF restructuring, one also need to write scripts to m…

terraform state mv is working for this but yeah, a migration path in some defined way would certainly be preferred.

Re: Terraform 1.0

#22

Post by tristor »

I've been using Terraform for years, and I'm really glad to see it reach 1.0. Congrats to the Terraform team at Hashicorp, and thanks to you and your colleagues for consistently making the tooling that makes operations at scale possible and keeping it open source.

Re: Terraform 1.0

#23

Post by Znafon »

thanatos519 wrote: post #18
kevincox wrote: post #9

I hate Terraform with a passion but it is probably the best tool out there for managing cloud infrastructure so I use it at work with no plans to replace it. The biggest downsides are the awful half-baked language and the awkwardness of modules and passing values throughout your config. Also the staticness of providers are a serious pain, for example you can't create a kubernetes cluster then add a resource to it. Th…

Amen! I found it excruciating that the language was always a few simple steps away from being homomorphic to JSON. I desperately needed to be able to manipulate it as data structures, not as strings. All of the ways I found to work around its limitations made me wish for something else entirely.

You can use JSON for your configuration: https://www.terraform.io/docs/language/syntax/json.html !

Re: Terraform 1.0

#24

Post by cube2222 »

thanatos519 wrote: post #18
kevincox wrote: post #9

I hate Terraform with a passion but it is probably the best tool out there for managing cloud infrastructure so I use it at work with no plans to replace it. The biggest downsides are the awful half-baked language and the awkwardness of modules and passing values throughout your config. Also the staticness of providers are a serious pain, for example you can't create a kubernetes cluster then add a resource to it. Th…

Amen! I found it excruciating that the language was always a few simple steps away from being homomorphic to JSON. I desperately needed to be able to manipulate it as data structures, not as strings. All of the ways I found to work around its limitations made me wish for something else entirely.

You can write Terraform using JSON if you want to: https://www.terraform.io/docs/language/syntax/json.html

Or do you mean something deeper?

Re: Terraform 1.0

#25

Post by granra »

kevincox wrote: post #9

I hate Terraform with a passion but it is probably the best tool out there for managing cloud infrastructure so I use it at work with no plans to replace it. The biggest downsides are the awful half-baked language and the awkwardness of modules and passing values throughout your config. Also the staticness of providers are a serious pain, for example you can't create a kubernetes cluster then add a resource to it. Th…

People mention pulumi but hashicorp are creating something similar with https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform-cdk. But all the existing terraform providers work with it afaik.

Re: Terraform 1.0

#26

Post by gdubya »

kevincox wrote: post #9

I hate Terraform with a passion but it is probably the best tool out there for managing cloud infrastructure so I use it at work with no plans to replace it. The biggest downsides are the awful half-baked language and the awkwardness of modules and passing values throughout your config. Also the staticness of providers are a serious pain, for example you can't create a kubernetes cluster then add a resource to it. Th…

I like Terraform for infrastructure, up to the point of creating the K8s cluster, then ArgoCD for keeping K8s in sync.

Re: Terraform 1.0

#27

Post by 3np »

pizza234 wrote: post #15
hnlmorg wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the biggest problem is that the state file is a JSON blob who's hierarchy directly maps the structure of your code in Terraform. This makes refactoring a nightmare as you're continually having to fudge the state file and/or declare that a resource defined in code relates to a resource defined in state (I forget the exact CLI flag you pass to do this off hand).

Yes, I think is reflected into our situation. For our TF codebase, specifically, it would be greate to deduplicate modules (which is something that couldn't be done some time ago), but there is no simple way of, say, creating a new module, and slowly migrate resources into it. In particular (AFAIK), there are no tools for moving stuff around, so in addition to the TF restructuring, one also need to write scripts to m…

You're looking for 'terraform state mv'. After my first handful of these it's now as natural as refactoring and moving modules in any code-base, almost.

Or if it's a big mess you can 'rm' and 'import'.

Re: Terraform 1.0

#28

Post by k__ »

granra wrote: post #25
kevincox wrote: post #9

I hate Terraform with a passion but it is probably the best tool out there for managing cloud infrastructure so I use it at work with no plans to replace it. The biggest downsides are the awful half-baked language and the awkwardness of modules and passing values throughout your config. Also the staticness of providers are a serious pain, for example you can't create a kubernetes cluster then add a resource to it. Th…

People mention pulumi but hashicorp are creating something similar with https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform-cdk . But all the existing terraform providers work with it afaik.

Right, tfcdk and k8scdk are a thing.

Pulumi is also integrating with TF.

Re: Terraform 1.0

#30

Post by rad_gruchalski »

thanatos519 wrote: post #18
kevincox wrote: post #9

I hate Terraform with a passion but it is probably the best tool out there for managing cloud infrastructure so I use it at work with no plans to replace it. The biggest downsides are the awful half-baked language and the awkwardness of modules and passing values throughout your config. Also the staticness of providers are a serious pain, for example you can't create a kubernetes cluster then add a resource to it. Th…

Amen! I found it excruciating that the language was always a few simple steps away from being homomorphic to JSON. I desperately needed to be able to manipulate it as data structures, not as strings. All of the ways I found to work around its limitations made me wish for something else entirely.

It's a language for a reason, there's a grammar, parser, lexer, ast. What's the problem?
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