[ctvo]

- Time it took to learn the skills to write a scalable service that can handle 100K events per second: 3 years

- Time it took to write that API on localhost: 4 days

- Time it took to learn Terraform and some AWS services, to create the API gateway, database, lambdas, queues, Route 53 records: 1 week

- Time it took to learn AWS IAM policies to create the IAM policies in Terraform: 4 weeks

Author conveniently left out a few bits of information. Once you learn IAM and Terraform, I'm doubtful it takes you another 4 weeks to setup the policies for a new project.

[JackFr]

In my experience Terraform was a horrible pain point, and yet I'd happily suffer it again. We can spin up and spin down transient UAT environments which are pristine and match PROD exactly in a matter of seconds and we can robustly test infrastructure changes. The improvement in developer productivity that entailed was worth the cost.