[cconstantine]

I've been using terraform for 10-ish years, and this is very much not how I feel about it. Terraform absolutely makes life easier; I've managed infrastructure without it and it's a nightmare.

Yes, it can be awkward, and yes the S3 bucket resource change was pretty bad, but overall its operating model (resources that move between states) is extremely powerful. The vast majority of "terraform" issues I've had have actually been issues with how something in AWS works or an attempt to use it for something that doesn't map well to resources with state. If an engineer at AWS makes a bone-headed decision about how something works then there isn't much the terraform folks can do to correct it.

I've actually been pretty frustrated trying to talk about terraform with people who don't "get it". They complain about the statefile without understanding how powerful it is. They complain about how it isn't truly cross-platform because you can't use the same code to launch an app in aws and gcp. They complain about the lack of first-party (aws) support. They complain about how hard it is to use without having tried to manually do what it does. Maybe you do "get it", and have a different idea of what terraform should do. Could you give a specific example (besides the s3 resource change) where it fails?

It's a complicated tool because the problem it's trying to solve is complicated. Maybe another tool can replace it, and maybe someone should make that tool because of this license change, but terraform does the thing it intends to do pretty well.

[sevagh]

I'm no Terraform expert but it's been in my resume and toolbox since ~2016.

Up until these changes, I would always pick Terraform for managing AWS. I have my gripes with it but it has been the best choice (as the saying goes, anybody that uses a tool long enough should have complaints about its limitations).

Now, however, I'm finally thinking of going with the CDK to insulate myself from more seismic shifts in the "OSS ecosystem" of devops tools.