Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Terraform 0.12

hashicorp.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 167 posts

Re: Terraform 0.12

#51

Post by mirceal »

_t0du wrote: post #15

I honestly love Terraform as a product. It was one of probably three tools I've used in my entire career that made me feel immediately more productive. After using it for a very short period of time I was shocked developers continued to struggle through CF templates and the fragility the whole process entailed.

this is short-sighted. Terraform and CloudFormation are not even in the same league. One of them works and actually can be used for Infrastructure as Code, the other one does not roll back in the face of failure - it effectively craps for reasons ranging from network failure, process crash, even normal operation. One is heavy kool-aid with bugs that go unresolved for years, the other behaves as advertised.

Sorry, but I have yet to meet a developer that used Terraform and willingly wants to keep using it after seeing it fail. When your tool cannot keep track of the resources it created or when it gets into situations where it doesn’t allow you to do certain things (like deleting all resources created) and you have to relearn how the underlying cloud works, it’s time to move on.

Do yourselves a favor and use Cloudformation (or your favorite cloud’s equivalent and just move on with your life)

Re: Terraform 0.12

#52

Post by mirceal »

deboflo wrote: post #40
techntoke wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed about CF. AWS puts a huge emphasis on CloudFormation when they know it is sub-par. Ansible is pretty cool too because you can easily convert between YAML/JSON for CF, and add a lot of flexibility based on variables and other things such as error handling that you can't do with Terraform.

Definitely not subpar. Cloudformation is an incredible service. I’ve used it to deploy thousands of stacks. It just works.

does it rollback in the face of failure? /s

Re: Terraform 0.12

#53

Post by mirceal »

SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #29
pensatoio wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As others have said, no exporting is involved. You write roughly-json-esque code which you then apply to a cloud provider. The state of the infrastructure is stored, ideally, in the cloud. You apply your code during which terraform identifies which changes need to be made by comparing the current state with your local changes and executes those changes as you watch. The end result is well-defined, testable, repeatabl…

>Infrastructure as code. Store it in git. Profit. Ok. But so is CloudFormation YAML files, mostly. So is the advantage of Teraform that it works beyond AWS?

huge difference between storing the infrastructure definition vs storing the infrastructure state. cloudformation manages the state for you and will not fuck it up / allow you to fuck it up

Re: Terraform 0.12

#54

Post by reilly3000 »

mirceal wrote: post #52
deboflo wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely not subpar. Cloudformation is an incredible service. I’ve used it to deploy thousands of stacks. It just works.

does it rollback in the face of failure? /s

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGui...

Re: Terraform 0.12

#55

Post by mirceal »

Ycros wrote: post #31

Good stuff. It looks like they've addressed a few of the ergonomic issues in their language with this release. The old way of doing iteration and having to use string interpolations just to reference variables were annoying.

Hashicorp got it right with Vagrant and its Ruby-based DSL. At the end of the day you could always drop down to a proper programming language and express what you wanted if the DSL was lacking. Why they had to invent this HCL monstrosity is beyond me.

Re: Terraform 0.12

#57

Post by reilly3000 »

I've been chasing infrastructure-as-code for a while, but I keep getting blocked by Terraform missing provider APIs (GCP Cloud Function Runtimes outside Nodejs, most recently), Kubernetes complexity, and generally being too lazy to sit down and bang out something in code that I can quickly iterate on with a console or quick CLI commands. I've had some wins with Serverless Framework, but outside that I've yet to see the payoff from the time I have put towards it. Am I defective?

Re: Terraform 0.12

#58

Post by colechristensen »

reilly3000 wrote: post #57

I've been chasing infrastructure-as-code for a while, but I keep getting blocked by Terraform missing provider APIs (GCP Cloud Function Runtimes outside Nodejs, most recently), Kubernetes complexity, and generally being too lazy to sit down and bang out something in code that I can quickly iterate on with a console or quick CLI commands. I've had some wins with Serverless Framework, but outside that I've yet to see t…

Just not working at a large enough scale.

Infrastructure as code becomes progressively more important as you add resources until you're at the point where terraform does the job of a whole team of administrators who would be spending all day clicking through UIs.

Re: Terraform 0.12

#59

Post by zbentley »

maxaf wrote: post #49
_t0du wrote: post #15

I honestly love Terraform as a product. It was one of probably three tools I've used in my entire career that made me feel immediately more productive. After using it for a very short period of time I was shocked developers continued to struggle through CF templates and the fragility the whole process entailed.

Viewing Terraform solely through the lens of cloud automation and in comparison with CloudFormation is a shortsighted mistake. Terraform has providers for plenty of other services that don't qualify as "cloud things" and lack proper configuration of their own. In a very general sense, Terraform is a terrific resource management tool with state versioning & locking built in. For example, there's a terraform-kafka-prov…

Someday folks will rediscover the potential of Puppet for these use cases. Until then, I'm content to watch countless alternative implementations come and go.

Re: Terraform 0.12

#60

Post by tptacek »

mirceal wrote: post #51
_t0du wrote: post #15

I honestly love Terraform as a product. It was one of probably three tools I've used in my entire career that made me feel immediately more productive. After using it for a very short period of time I was shocked developers continued to struggle through CF templates and the fragility the whole process entailed.

this is short-sighted. Terraform and CloudFormation are not even in the same league. One of them works and actually can be used for Infrastructure as Code, the other one does not roll back in the face of failure - it effectively craps for reasons ranging from network failure, process crash, even normal operation. One is heavy kool-aid with bugs that go unresolved for years, the other behaves as advertised. Sorry, but…

I mean, this is harsh, but there's a running joke that the big feature terraform is missing is a -twice flag so that it'll re-run itself on failure, since that's what you end up having to do anyways.

Also, the terraform language, HCL? It's, I guess there's no better way to put this: not good.

Am I misunderstanding the complexity of what Terraform is trying to do? To me, it looks like a bunch of tiny API clients tied together with a topological sort --- in other words, it's just another species of "make". It feels like it carries a whole lot more complexity than that concept warrants, but just enough simplicity to make it not a serious programming language. It's, to me, one of those frustrating uncanny valley systems.

I am prepared to be totally wrong about this.

Post reply on HN