[bilalq]

Haven't heard of Dagger before, but using IaC as code to model your pipelines (including pipelines of infra that itself is modeled as IaC) is absolutely the right way to do things. And doing it in a real programming language rather than some limiting yaml schema is so much nicer. Places I've worked at in the past would refer to these as meta pipelines or self-mutating pipelines.

For this reason, I love using the AWS CDK. Being able to model things in TypeScript was so much nicer than the janky flow of always feeling lost in some Ruby/JSON/YAML IaC template monstrosity.

Curious how Dagger differentiates itself from AWS CDK or cdktf.

[shykes]

Dagger and IaC tools (AWS CDK, Terraform, Pulumi) are very complementary. Here's a livestream of Nic Jackson (devrel at Terraform) using Dagger and Terraform CDK together to build and deploy an application: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFNe5W1o2_U

The main difference is that Dagger focuses on running your entire CI/CD pipeline as a DAG of operations running in containers; whereas IaC tools focus on managing infrastructure state. The typical integration is Dagger would run your IaC tool in a container, and integrate that into a broader pipeline with well-defined inputs and outputs. Dagger itself is stateless except for its cache: infrastructure state management is handed off to your IaC tool.