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Don't get me wrong CSS isn't perfect, but it has done a really good job of scaling through difficult problems as HTML, and browsers, and user expectations have grown over the decades. The tooling and CSS frameworks have gotten really good. I think HTML + CSS is an example of a declarative system where you can start out not knowing very much about it, just drop in Bootstrap or Tailwind, and start getting great results by using prebuilt CSS classes from someone else. This is what is missing in most modern infrastructure as code. Sure you can start out with prebuilt IaC templates from someone else, but these templates are basically like getting handed a big chunk of HTML that has inline styles on it. It might render great in the browser and look great, but its hard to read, its hard to understand why it works, and you'll have trouble adding on your changes to it without breaking things. What I'd like to do is decouple the semantic aspects of infrastructure from the specific configuration aspect, similar to how HTML + CSS lets developers write their semantic markup with semantic CSS class names, and then have a CSS framework provide the exact styles that make it look pretty. Infrastructure as code needs a similar standard library of semantic configuration mix-ins that you can apply to your infrastructure as layered mutations to produce the final result. There are many tools out there approaching this challenge right now from different ways, and I think the future of infrastructure as code is going to look quite different from what most people are doing today, more like HTML + CSS, or imperative code, than flat YAML and static structures that must list out all their own properties. |