What if something breaks in production and it's not clear what's happening because it's hidden somewhere in the application code behind layers of magic
Speeding up Azure development by not using Terraform
21–30 of 87 posts
Re: Speeding up Azure development by not using Terraform
#22After the Terraform relicensing ordeal, do yourself a favor, if you're starting greenfield, use your cloud provider's provided provisioning tools. I wish I had CDK/Cloudformation skills, and not Terraform skills.
Opentofu is terraform compatible and way better than bicep imho
Re: Speeding up Azure development by not using Terraform
#23After the Terraform relicensing ordeal, do yourself a favor, if you're starting greenfield, use your cloud provider's provided provisioning tools. I wish I had CDK/Cloudformation skills, and not Terraform skills.
What about outside of AWS? Are folks only using a single provider? Our list of providers is long and includes a whole ecosystem of stuff from GitHub to Okta and Datadog. Everything needed to host and operate an application is in the Terraform configuration.
Re: Speeding up Azure development by not using Terraform
#24Why do people do this? I skim the article. I go wait "Nitric sounds like Pulumi". A few googles later, I find this : https://nitric.io/docs/reference/pulumi So, it's fast because it uses Pulumi... Does Pulumi no longer build on Terraform providers? (EDIT: looking, it seems like many Pulumi providers are still terraform wrappers...) Either way, it feels like this is just a Pulumi feature.
Pulumi doesn't rely on Terraform core at all, and Terraform providers use a bridge[0].
Re: Speeding up Azure development by not using Terraform
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Certainly, but Terraform also sucks at this! I have had all sorts of problems with providers that basically lie to your face about the guarantees they make, state files always getting funky and needing escalation, special things needing to be put in special files or "terraform will get mad" (the actual staff sre's comments) It's not a tool I have ever thought was great!
This tool is going to have the same problems as Terraform only worse. It's wrapping Pulumi and managing the state file for that. Yet another abstraction layer on-top of it all. I'd love to be proven wrong if they can output Pulumi code from their application code? Even then, I'm not sure what the monetization play here is? You're standing on the shoulders of Pulumi and you're open-source. If you go down the managed r…
I am not any of those things nor do I know anything about their product, just saying that when anyone is crap potting for Terraform it just has always sucked in every job I have ever worked at.
Re: Speeding up Azure development by not using Terraform
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Certainly, but Terraform also sucks at this! I have had all sorts of problems with providers that basically lie to your face about the guarantees they make, state files always getting funky and needing escalation, special things needing to be put in special files or "terraform will get mad" (the actual staff sre's comments) It's not a tool I have ever thought was great!
That's fine but that's not really a fault of terraform usually but the provider. Terraform itself is a wrapper around the cloud API's the providers use. For your comments regarding "state files getting funky" I have also never seen this as a problem with terraform itself, but rather people doing insanely stupid things with it. "terraform gets mad" seems like a constraint of whatever home-grown modules your staff SRE…
Well, maybe there's some terraform jedis out there but I have seen the same problem at four companies so far, and at this point I keep my nose right out of it because its always a chore treadmill.
Re: Speeding up Azure development by not using Terraform
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, sorta. Azure has Bicep now [1], to compete with Terraform and ARM JSON templates. (Separately, there's also the whole Dapr thing, what a sight to see that Discord and complete lack of interest from anyone outside the company). [1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-resource-manag...
Bicep is fantastic. But it compiles to ARM, so it's still limited by ARM's weaknesses and gaps, in addition to the underlying general instability of Azure and the inconsistencies from the Resource Providers. As well, Bicep is declarative- which is elegant in theory, but the stateful design of Terraform can cover up some of those underlying ARM/Azure gaps in practice. The deployment stacks approach on Azure should hel…
This just makes it even more asinine that they had to invent their own language. I'm sure I'd be just as productive with Nix and builtins.toJSON. At least they didn't do jsonnet, eh?
Re: Speeding up Azure development by not using Terraform
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's fine but that's not really a fault of terraform usually but the provider. Terraform itself is a wrapper around the cloud API's the providers use. For your comments regarding "state files getting funky" I have also never seen this as a problem with terraform itself, but rather people doing insanely stupid things with it. "terraform gets mad" seems like a constraint of whatever home-grown modules your staff SRE…
Well, maybe there's some terraform jedis out there but I have seen the same problem at four companies so far, and at this point I keep my nose right out of it because its always a chore treadmill.
Much of the consulting work I do surrounds terraform and most people are doing it very poorly or incorrectly. I do not think this is a fault of terraform. For instance, not going all in on IAC and having mixed/poor practice around automation and click-ops'ing things for "speed" is a great way to have inconsistent terraform states. As far as a flat out state corruption, I've only seen that one time in ~6 years working with terraform, and it was due to the mechanism locking the state file failing during simultaneous updates. In today's version I'm not even sure how I'd go about corrupting a terraform state file sanely. There are a lot more guard rails and QoL stuff since the pre-1.0 version days.
Re: Speeding up Azure development by not using Terraform
#29After the Terraform relicensing ordeal, do yourself a favor, if you're starting greenfield, use your cloud provider's provided provisioning tools. I wish I had CDK/Cloudformation skills, and not Terraform skills.
But Cloudflare, github, hetzner, etc don't provide a provisioning tool..
Re: Speeding up Azure development by not using Terraform
#30Separation of concerns thrown out the window. Nobody show this to Bob Martin.