[JohnMakin]

> I believe that infrastructure as code languages and tool assisted generators that we currently use are good, and they are taking steps in the right direction, but most of them are trying to patch over underlying complexity in a way that is fundamentally unscalable.

Sure, I can get behind this. Yesterday I was trying to figure out how to give a name to EC2 instances generated by AWS-managed autoscaler group that’s created by a node group resource. Simple, right? should just be able to add a Name = $tag field to the node group somewhere to apply to the generated ec2’s?

well, not quite. What you actually need is a separate autoscaling_group_tag resource.

Well, that resource needs a reference to an autoscaling group arn. but I dont manage an autoscaling group, my node group does, so in the end I have to figure out how to reference it like:

aws_node_group.node_group.resources.0.autoscaling_groups.0.arn

well, not quite, you may need a try block around that, and maybe some lifecycle rules to get around weird race conditions.

so yea. I’m not complaining about HCL or terraform. I find it much better than the alternatives. but lots of times my reaction to stuff like this is “there’s no way it has to be like this.”

[intelVISA]

> “there’s no way it has to be like this.”

It really doesn't, but alas: worship at the altar of unnecessary cloud complexity or be cast out to the on-prem Elysian field.

[TheNewsIsHere]

Yeah. I’m following this discussion and not really finding myself able to relate very well.

We’re using IAC almost exclusively; loads of Ansible particularly. Everything is essentially a Kubernetes manifest or a playbook in Ansible (which runs on Kubernetes). We exited the “all in on one cloud and all its services” methodology and it made our lives _vastly_ less complex. We don’t really need the kinds of complexity that brings. We picked two tools as close to the metal as was reasonably portable between any given VM or bare metal stack, and deploy everything else on top of that. It has made life _so_ much easier.

Of course we still use some best in class services, but we avoid proprietary services that cannot be at least functionally replaced inside a week, unless we’re hosting them ourselves.

[psd1]

I think you've muddled "Elysian fields" (the reward of heroes) with "being put out to pasture" (superannuation).

[intelVISA]

It's both :)