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Terraform 1.0

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Re: Terraform 1.0

#121

Post by lvncelot »

kevincox wrote: post #52
throwaway894345 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

100%. Terraform is half-way between a tool for generating the configuration and applying it. I think Terraform's application engine is actually quite good, but I would like to use a much better tool to generate the config. (And be able to diff that config) You can feed JSON to Terraform however this falls over if you need dependencies for output values. This usually isn't an issue because most Cloud provider resource…

> You can feed JSON to Terraform however this falls over if you need dependencies for output values

This is what I've started doing with Jsonnet for generation, and also exactly why I've stopped doing it.

Re: Terraform 1.0

#122

Post by hnjst »

gouggoug wrote: post #109
oxplot wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> for example you can't create a kubernetes cluster then add a resource to it Of course you can! DM me if you want details.

Yes you can, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27435269

I can confirm, we're using a similar approach at it mostly works.

There are still issues though, if you try to remove your cluster the k8s provider can't be configured (no module.my_cluster.cluster_id anymore) and the refresh phase of plan will fail. You can find workarounds but those I know are quite manual / ugly.

Re: Terraform 1.0

#123

Post by hnjst »

gouggoug wrote: post #87
nrmitchi wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to see an example of this actually working, because I have had the opposite experience (explicitly with the Kubernetes and Helm providers); I've had to do applies in multiple steps.

This should work (as in, it will create the cluster and only then add the k8s resource to it, in the same plan/apply). Here the module creates an EKS cluster, but this would work for any module that creates a k8s cluster. module "my_cluster" { source = "terraform-aws-modules/eks/aws" version = "17.0.2" cluster_name = "my-cluster" cluster_version = "1.18" } # Queries for Kubernetes authentication # this data query dep…

Using something similar, but it doesn't handle well cluster deletion.

Re: Terraform 1.0

#124

Post by mrweasel »

oxplot wrote: post #108
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…

> Two years ago I looked into it and rather then having an abstraction from cloud providers This is a misrepresentation I've seen multiple times and I don't know how it's come to be. Terraform doesn't abstract resources. It simply supports all cloud providers and lets you intermix resources from different clouds inside a single project. Resources can depend on each other and use each other's attributes. As an example…

I believe the issue is the Terraform has been labelled: “Cloud agnostic”. That was why I believed that Terraform would abstract away the individual cloud providers.

It depends on your interpretation of the word “agnostic”. Personally I would say a more correct description would be: Support for multiple cloud providers.

Re: Terraform 1.0

#125

Post by cormacrelf »

kevincox wrote: post #52
throwaway894345 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

100%. Terraform is half-way between a tool for generating the configuration and applying it. I think Terraform's application engine is actually quite good, but I would like to use a much better tool to generate the config. (And be able to diff that config) You can feed JSON to Terraform however this falls over if you need dependencies for output values. This usually isn't an issue because most Cloud provider resource…

It’s pretty wild that the object identity via name thing is still a problem. Can they not add a transitional name feature where an object is known by multiple aliases for a while and then when you have finished putting though a change, you can delete the original name? Is this not very basic SQL migration practice? Like column aliases until no longer needed.

Re: Terraform 1.0

#126

Post by ekimekim »

kevincox wrote: post #52
throwaway894345 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

100%. Terraform is half-way between a tool for generating the configuration and applying it. I think Terraform's application engine is actually quite good, but I would like to use a much better tool to generate the config. (And be able to diff that config) You can feed JSON to Terraform however this falls over if you need dependencies for output values. This usually isn't an issue because most Cloud provider resource…

You may be interested in Pulumi: https://www.pulumi.com/

Basically it's Terraform but instead of declaring your resources in HCL, you declare them in a real programming language. You're still producing a declarative config that the engine then diffs, applies etc. In fact, it's compatible with existing terraform providers, so it has a surprisingly large selection of things you can use it for.

Note their docs will try to guide you towards using their hosted service which basically does nothing except host the state file, but you can use an S3 or GCS bucket instead and it works fine.

It's definitely not without its own problems, but I'd say it's overall an improvement.

Re: Terraform 1.0

#127

Post by cormacrelf »

mwarkentin wrote: post #75
kevincox wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100%. Terraform is half-way between a tool for generating the configuration and applying it. I think Terraform's application engine is actually quite good, but I would like to use a much better tool to generate the config. (And be able to diff that config) You can feed JSON to Terraform however this falls over if you need dependencies for output values. This usually isn't an issue because most Cloud provider resource…

There's CDK for Terraform: https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform-cdk

Someone should make a Clojure demo of those Java bindings, or even cljs. I hope Clojure has good type based completions these days, because it would be a fantastic language for this.

Re: Terraform 1.0

#128

Post by polskibus »

Does anyone use terraform for onpremise clusters? If so, what is your setup, what hypervisor do you use it with? Are you happy with it? Or maybe you would rather replace it with a set of ansible roles?

Re: Terraform 1.0

#129

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

mwcampbell wrote: post #91
eKIK wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 from me on the "awful half-baked language" (HCL). I just recently wrote an article about my experience, including issues and workarounds, when migrating from Terraform to Pulumi: https://blog.ekik.org/my-experience-migrating-my-infrastruct... Hope it's OK that I'm sharing it here. I think it's relevant because there seems to be quite a lot of interest around Pulumi, and how one would go about moving from Terraform…

I'm actually thinking of going the other way. I've been using Pulumi for several months now, and I'm thinking of moving to Terraform, because it has a so much larger third-party ecosystem, including more providers, and tools that can analyze HCL, like Infracost and security scanners. When will I learn to see the bigger picture and value popularity over quality?

I work in a very large shop with lots of TF and we do not use any of the "ecosystem" other than Terragrunt. Almost all of it is experimental junk.

We use almost entirely one provider, with things like a "template" or "random" provider as well, which are really just core features they decided to split off into plugins. Even when we use SaaS that there is a provider for, we don't use the provider, because we aren't constantly changing it, or managing it doesn't require lots of people across multiple teams with multiple iterations and modules.

Re: Terraform 1.0

#130

Post by xorcist »

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…

Why not use something like Ansible instead?

It too is declarative. It too can be easily extended. It's also something a lot of people already know.

I used to use Ansible or Puppet for these things before Terraform was all the rage. It was a lot more stable than trying to distributing those state files, which is a strange design to pick. There are plenty of existing modules but it's also dead simple to write your own.

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