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Terraform 1.0

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Re: Terraform 1.0

#61

Post by sushiburps »

kerng wrote: post #37

Serious question. What value does Terraform provide? Two years ago I looked into it and rather then having an abstraction from cloud providers it seemed to require to still target (and code against) each one specifically. So, I was quite disappointed as I thought the value proposition was to not have to know x cloud provider specific terminologies. Any insights much appreciated. Edit: I was a little worried asking su…

You're right, Terraform is not "write once, deploy infrastructure anywhere" tool. It does however allow you to reuse many portions of your infrastructure descriptions between cloud providers by using module composition[1].

Terraform can also be used to put your infrastructure under version control, which is a pretty big deal.

[1] https://www.terraform.io/docs/language/modules/develop/compo...

Re: Terraform 1.0

#62

Post by zimbatm »

syntaxstic wrote: post #47
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…

How does terraform compare to ansible?

Both tools can be used to create cloud resources and configure machines but fundamentally they are very different.

Ansible is a list of actions that you apply linearly. Each action might be a noop if it already exists.

Terraform is a tree of resources that are applied by order of dependency. Terraform also records the previous run and deletes resources that are no longer in the code.

Generally, Ansible is great at performing actions on a lot of hosts. A sort of multi-ssh. And Terraform is best adapted to manage cloud resources.

Re: Terraform 1.0

#63

Post by nuker »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #31
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 strongly agree both with respect for the half-baked-ness of the language and with the "it's probably the best out there". Ultimately, these tools should have a static/yaml-like "assembly language" that describes the state of your infrastructure without any of the DRY. There would be a diffing engine which would figure out what changes need to be applied and apply them accordingly. Users could use some vanilla progr…

> Ultimately, these tools should have a static/yaml-like "assembly language" that describes the state of your infrastructure without any of the DRY.

CloudFormation ?

> There would be a diffing engine which would figure out what changes need to be applied and apply them accordingly.

CloudFormation.

Re: Terraform 1.0

#64

Post by ourcat »

Interestingly, I heard that Terraform's registry is hosted via Fastly. I was wondering if there was any correlation with the timing of this release and Fastly's outage earlier.

Re: Terraform 1.0

#65

Post by kevincox »

syntaxstic wrote: post #47
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…

How does terraform compare to ansible?

Ansible focuses on provisioning machines whereas Terraform focuses on creating Cloud infrastructure. A common combo is using Terraform to provision VMs and networking settings then using Ansible to configure those VMs.

I find few if any reasons to use Ansible over a shell script. IMHO Ansible is just a weird YAML syntax to generate a "shell" script with some utilities to ship that script to nodes over the network. I find it super awkward not to mention slow and inconsistent.

For deployments I much prefer using Nix and for imperative actions I just use actual shell/python.

Re: Terraform 1.0

#66

Post by kevincox »

sandGorgon wrote: post #12
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…

have you tried pulumi ? what's your opinion ?

I have not.

Re: Terraform 1.0

#67

Post by pram »

syntaxstic wrote: post #47
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…

How does terraform compare to ansible?

They're not competition. I use Terraform for infra provisioning, and Ansible for post-provisioning application setup. I also use Packer + Ansible playbooks to build my AMIs.

Re: Terraform 1.0

#68

Post by Lutger »

kerng wrote: post #37

Serious question. What value does Terraform provide? Two years ago I looked into it and rather then having an abstraction from cloud providers it seemed to require to still target (and code against) each one specifically. So, I was quite disappointed as I thought the value proposition was to not have to know x cloud provider specific terminologies. Any insights much appreciated. Edit: I was a little worried asking su…

Abstracting over Cloud vendors is not a use case for Terraform itself. The value it brings is that you get to specify your infrastructure 'as code', which means you'll be able to re-create it from code, and reliably deploy changes.

There's a lot more benefits, it depends on what you are comparing it against. Coming from a software development background, I'd like to compare it to a wordpress app vs webapp development from something like rails. The wordpress app works fine, is faster to write, but once it gets complex things fall apart. The rails app is maybe a bit more difficult to develop at first, some features might take longer, but it's more flexbile, powerful and when engineered well, it will not hit a ceiling where it just all falls apart.

Re: Terraform 1.0

#69

Post by himinlomax »

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…

The tool is ok, but developing plugins for it shows how inadequate Golang is for the job. There's so much repetition and boilerplate required. I wrote a FreeIPA plugin a few years back, it handled just registering a host and the executable weighed over 100 MB! WTF? Haven't looked at that side of things lately, I wonder if it's different nowadays.

Re: Terraform 1.0

#70

Post by nuker »

kerng wrote: post #37

Serious question. What value does Terraform provide? Two years ago I looked into it and rather then having an abstraction from cloud providers it seemed to require to still target (and code against) each one specifically. So, I was quite disappointed as I thought the value proposition was to not have to know x cloud provider specific terminologies. Any insights much appreciated. Edit: I was a little worried asking su…

> Any insights much appreciated.

Don't do multi-cloud, its not worth it. And tools claiming to do multi-cloud lie. For AWS stick to CloudFormation.

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