[twalla]

As a something of a k8s maximalist, I kind of disagree here. I think, especially for early stage and smaller teams, TF ends up being "closer to the metal" in the sense that there are fewer concepts and abstractions that need to be understood before an engineer can build a model of the resources they want, how they are grouped and how state reconciliation works. With k8s you're really just trading out crappy third party modules and providers for crappy operators and controllers.

I do think that as organizations grow, the ability for components to be defined in smaller units without being enmeshed in a big-ass tf dependency graph is a big draw of the controller model. The flipside is this comes with accepting the operational overhead of k8s plus the attendant controllers/operators you're running and hiring/staffing accordingly. There are ways you can structure your terraform that avoids creating the tight coupling some folks don't like where you have to literally define the entire universe to change a machine image. Not to mention, there do exist tools that allow you to inspect and visualize tf state.

[pharmakom]

I think Terraform should consider making targeted applies a first class feature/workflow.

Right now, Terraform maximalism requires reproducible builds, which is not something most orgs can achieve.