11–20 of 137 posts
Devs writing Terraform means ops doesn't move fast enough. Fix ops instead of forcing the teams to roll their own.
What a long winded article to say "it depends", I liked the history though. It got me thinking, here at amazon, we deliver "infrastructure as code" using the Cloud Development Kit: https://aws.amazon.com/cdk/ We expect engineers (not devops) to define their infrastructure in typescript and configure it through code. That code gets turned into cloudformation scripts and stands up the how cloud system for the api you'r…
What a long winded article to say "it depends", I liked the history though. It got me thinking, here at amazon, we deliver "infrastructure as code" using the Cloud Development Kit: https://aws.amazon.com/cdk/ We expect engineers (not devops) to define their infrastructure in typescript and configure it through code. That code gets turned into cloudformation scripts and stands up the how cloud system for the api you'r…
The layers of AWSCDK leads to a lot of brittleness, and that was a huge turn-off for us. I like the thought of building systems in a functional way but the tooling just isn't there yet. I haven't dived too deep into Terraform CDK yet, and Pulumi just had too many problems.
Devs writing Terraform means ops doesn't move fast enough. Fix ops instead of forcing the teams to roll their own.
But, as the article points out, centralized ops teams many times do not have the capacity to handle all the requests coming from the dev teams.
> "There were endless complaints about the time taken to get ‘central IT’ to do their bidding, and frequent demands for more autonomy and freedom. A cloud project was initiated by the centralised DBA team to enable that autonomy. [...] Cue howls of despair from the development teams that they need a centralised DBA service"
Author makes it sound like users didn't know what they wanted. This is not true -- I have seen this play in practice, and what author omits is _it was a different set of people_ who were complaining before and after.
If a dev team has at least 2 engineers who are happy working with infrastructure, then the team will benefit from autonomy. If there is no one like that on the dev team, they will cry in despair.
Devs writing Terraform means ops doesn't move fast enough. Fix ops instead of forcing the teams to roll their own.
Devs writing Terraform means ops doesn't move fast enough. Fix ops instead of forcing the teams to roll their own.
No matter how capable and well-staffed ops is, it will always take them much longer to provision my stuff than if i did it myself. I like having more eyes on stuff before it hits prod, but waiting days to get things setup in dev is not just unproductive, but demoralizing.
What a long winded article to say "it depends", I liked the history though. It got me thinking, here at amazon, we deliver "infrastructure as code" using the Cloud Development Kit: https://aws.amazon.com/cdk/ We expect engineers (not devops) to define their infrastructure in typescript and configure it through code. That code gets turned into cloudformation scripts and stands up the how cloud system for the api you'r…
The layers of AWSCDK leads to a lot of brittleness, and that was a huge turn-off for us. I like the thought of building systems in a functional way but the tooling just isn't there yet. I haven't dived too deep into Terraform CDK yet, and Pulumi just had too many problems.
Had we built this out in terraform, state cleanup and tracking would have been more robust, the ability to retry resource creation would have been more stable, the project overall would have been much more of a pleasure to use. The functional/declarative aspect of terraform in relation to cloudformation is so much more polished.
Edit: declarative
It is a nightmare of arcane copy pasting.
Terraform is an overengineered mess, a complex enemy I need to beat to deploy my simple changes.
At my company, I do. As a backend engineer. Guided by the devops team. It is a nightmare of arcane copy pasting. Terraform is an overengineered mess, a complex enemy I need to beat to deploy my simple changes.