[m1keil]

I wasn't suggesting that CMS fell from grace because they were being stateless. I was saying that when TF just started, these tools were in the right position to take lead over the IaaC space and didn't because the stateless model didn't fit. Take a look at Ansible's cloud modules, they tried.

TF's success, in my opinion, can be boiled down to:

a) Having a state - allowed them to provide declarative config with plan functionality

b) Choosing Go - removed the burden of installing or having to invest in self contained setup like they did with Vagrant & ruby.

I'm not a TF zealot. I hate my life every time I need to use it. And yet I know that there are no better alternatives out there. I'm sure there are some nice things in Pulumi or cdk-tf but I doubt switching to any worth the investment with existing TF project.

I would be glad to try and play with a tf-like project that works without state - "talk is cheap, show me the code".

[whydoineedthis]

Off topic, but, cdk-tf is useless because it doesn't have a data layer. It gives you the power to write real code, but with no vars to utilize. It's rubbish.