[dangus]

Once you're experienced writing Infrastructure as Code, you always use it, no matter how small the project is. Right now I run a single micro instance for a personal project and I've got the whole thing Terraformed, which took me less than a workday - VPC, subnet, security groups, S3 buckets, and a basic provisioning script to setup the instance's software and cron jobs.

It is (eventually, once you learn it) faster and more intuitive than bothering with the AWS console, and I often reference Terraform's own AWS resource documentation over the AWS docs since it usually has better information density.

Anyway, the issue is all beside the point, I think we realize that Terraform was used as a placeholder example. Another example might be setting up single sign on, Active Directory, and other things that are truly not necessary for a company of that scale.

The other part of this that if you've got a startup with 5 month runway and 10 employees, hiring an Infrastructure as Code SME is probably not the best use of your dollars. Sure, I was able to put this side project in Terraform in under a day, but I also can't write a front-end application to get myself out of a wet paper bag.

[reallydontask]

> Once you're experienced writing Infrastructure as Code, you always use it, no matter how small the project is.

It's a good idea to start early with IaC but one of the marks of a good engineer is knowing what tooling to use for each circumstance.

Your app might be a perfect fit for Terraform or it might not, I couldn't possibly comment. Given the info you've provided it seems excessive but it's hard to say for sure

[ncallaway]

I can't think of a project of any size that terraform would be excessive for.

Agree, if you're introducing it to a new team and don't have time to teach the tooling that could be problematic.

But being somewhat familiar with Terraform I would use it to launch a single EC2 instance. Because it's about as fast to do that as it would be for me to use the AWS Console.

It's not that I think Terraform is needed for that small of a project, it's that it adds no cost even for tiny projects.

[reallydontask]

The original comment suggested that Terraform was being introduced at the wrong time.

You are right that size is not the best measure of suitability.

[hef19898]

Not sure about the run-way thing. I'm also partially a six sigma / lean guy, and doing things right in the first place is a key lesson I learned, sometimes the hard way (aerospace definitely drove this home as well).

I would make the case that, even with 5 months of runway, you should invest in a solid foundation. Because if the company goes down, it does. Only a little bit earlier. if it doesn't, which is I assume the reasoning behind the company in the first place, getting the basics right now has a huge impact on runway and scalability later on.

[metalforever]

The problem is that sometimes, the overhead isn't the right decision from a cognitive load perspective and a fiscal perspective (cost of infrastructure + developer time).