[yegle]

I recently gave a tech talk internally about Terraform. I wanted to show how quickly a web service can get complicated by showing the SVG generated from `terraform graph` output.

It failed miserably:

$ tf graph|dot -Tpng > graph.png

dot: graph is too large for cairo-renderer bitmaps. Scaling by 0.420618 to fit

Trying to upload the genrated image to Google Slides and the error message: The image is too large. Images must be smaller than 25 megapixels.

$ tf state list|cut -d. -f3|grep ^google_|sort|uniq|wc -l

42 <-- different types of Google Cloud resources we use in our Terraform configs.

I'm very skeptical this config can be managed using a WYSIWYG tool.

[BillinghamJ]

Wonder if it'd be more achievable if the product natively understood TF modules? So you tend not to describe or view direct AWS resources, but slightly higher level concepts your eng team uses - then you only see the actual resources if you "zoom in" to a lower level scope

[chafik-bel]

Terraform modules will probably be available during Q1/2021. We started by releasing the market place which is the first step towards TF modules.

[chafik-bel]

The best way to verify that is to test it on Brainboard, I'm excited to know the results. We can do it together if you want, lemme know if you are interested.

[gchamonlive]

there are issues with `terraform graph` that taint the output a little with unnecessary information: https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/issues/14511

People at hashicorp are aware of it but it doesn't seem to be a priority getting the output to look nicer right now

[jcims]

Gephi is good for drawing large graphs. Takes a minute to get used to the UI.