[raffraffraff]

Hmmm. I just have to strongly disagree. I hit those hard spots in terraform, just like I did in puppet years ago. But I'd still prefer to use a DSL for configuration management (because that's what both are). Puppet actually managed to get to a very usable state by v5, if used with hiera, you could essentially define some types and fling data at them using 'create_resources', which is the equivalent of "for each" over a data set. If you stick to that pattern and make good use of hiera, your codebase will be compact and easy to reason about. The difference between your environments will be a few lines of yaml. In fact I use his with terraform, to that same end. I've looked at pulumi and I just don't like it. Terraform has it's quirks and limitations but I still prefer it.

Maybe DSLs are a waste of Lee's time because he knows they'll be "dead languages" when the next major evolution of systems takes place. But meh, I'll learn the next DSL, and maybe even hook hiera up to it too.