Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by baridbelmedar 807 days ago
Imho, I think we've gone a bit overboard with Terraform at my company. Sure, it'll automate a bunch of stuff, but only a handful of people will really "get" it.

I think the rest of us who interact with it don't really fully understand what's going on. We've basically traded one set of scripts only a few folks understood (bash, perl) for Terraform in this case.

I totally see the benefits, but sometimes I feel like we try to force everything into it, even when it might not be the best fit.
2 comments
scaryclam 807 days ago
I often see people making what could be very simple terraform setups into incompehensible monolithic monsters as well.

I tend to preach separating things out and keeping things small. Why do you need a huge TF project to manage 15 services and have weird conditional parts when you can have 15 smaller projects that can deviate from a boilerplate template where it's sensible? I get that running "terraform apply" in one place makes the ops team's life easier, but the mess it creates in the actual TF isn't worthwhile IMO. And god forbid you use TF for your infrastructure and deploy using something that works more appropriately.

link
sgarland 807 days ago
The opposite can be true as well. I’ve seen TF environments that were designed with so many layers of abstractions that unraveling a single piece of infra was an incredibly long endeavor.

Solving Imaginary Problems At Scale is a thing. Monolithic TF – or at least one per env – will take you extremely far, and is easy to immediately understand. When it comes time to break out of it, don’t go overboard.

link
yourapostasy 807 days ago
The network effects benefits of a large population using a common domain specific language and abstraction are easily overlooked when one on the inside of that echo chamber dealing with the warts of that context frame. I’m also not overly fond of the current state of IaC but we have a good enough foundation upon which I have a rough line of sight on a future where we develop better representations going forward, and that alone is enough for me to avoid wholesale tossing it out or halting/slowing its use.
link