11–20 of 23 posts
“script” seems like absolutely the wrong terminology for something as die-hard-declarative as Terraform. In my circle of engineers we tend to call it “code” but this isn’t ideal either - implies a general purpose language.
My circle also just use "code" as far as I'm aware, though I tend to think of it as a definition instead. Template would also fit but you can use templates within Terraform so that could be confusing.
I hate seeing Terraform script or scripting . Am I the only one?
What do you think of Pulumi? My understanding is that this essentially uses TF as a backend
My quick observations:
* It's nice to write TypeScript as the configuration language
* The provider documentation is poor and lacks the examples that terraform has, I find my self reading terraform documentation to understand how to configure Pulumi.
* You're constantly fighting with "async" vs "Input" vs "apply" when using a value, basic cases are handled in Pulumi but as soon as you want to do something complex you're toast. Maybe I just am doing it wrong, but that goes back to the lack of docs.
* How it handles dev/production/staging is just a little off from my expectations, not that terraform at it's core does this well either (why terragrunt exists).
Overall it's not bad, but it's not a silver bullet either to the typical problems. And suffers from a "small" community problem where you can't google solutions to problems with the same success.
I hate seeing Terraform script or scripting . Am I the only one?
No you’re not the only one. The problem with Terraform “Scripting” is in a lot of cases it takes a loooong time to find out your “runtime” errors. These are typically fat fingered strings. I think something like AWS CDK, where you find these errors at compile, time is a better approach.
“script” seems like absolutely the wrong terminology for something as die-hard-declarative as Terraform. In my circle of engineers we tend to call it “code” but this isn’t ideal either - implies a general purpose language.
I hate seeing Terraform script or scripting . Am I the only one?
I hate seeing Terraform script or scripting . Am I the only one?
No you’re not the only one. The problem with Terraform “Scripting” is in a lot of cases it takes a loooong time to find out your “runtime” errors. These are typically fat fingered strings. I think something like AWS CDK, where you find these errors at compile, time is a better approach.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My circle also just use "code" as far as I'm aware, though I tend to think of it as a definition instead. Template would also fit but you can use templates within Terraform so that could be confusing.
The official name for .tf files is a “configuration”, per the code base.
Once configuration is code, i.e. Turing complete, something has gone awry.
“script” seems like absolutely the wrong terminology for something as die-hard-declarative as Terraform. In my circle of engineers we tend to call it “code” but this isn’t ideal either - implies a general purpose language.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The official name for .tf files is a “configuration”, per the code base.
Which makes sense in the context of managing "configuration as code". Once configuration is code, i.e. Turing complete, something has gone awry.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No you’re not the only one. The problem with Terraform “Scripting” is in a lot of cases it takes a loooong time to find out your “runtime” errors. These are typically fat fingered strings. I think something like AWS CDK, where you find these errors at compile, time is a better approach.
terraform really needs to be run in CI/CD pipe. Even without the backend initialized you can run terraform validate which will find things like undeclared variables and messed up count and foreach references.