[jayceedenton]

Is there any benefit to using workspaces over just introducing some variables and having an 'environment' variable?

You can have a directory per environment and a directory of shared resources that are used by all environments.

It seems like workspaces add a new construct to be learned and another thing to add to all commands without much benefit. Could we just stick with the simple way of doing this?

[maurobaraldi]

The proposal shows an example on how to isolate environments without duplicating some code. It acts, more or less, as a template for the architecture which you render it according to the values (environments/accounts).

I agree it isn't a simplest way to do that, but I don't think that it add as much complexity this. Perhaps it could be more laborious for the point of view of architecture, but it could be easier to handle and maintain.

[NomDePlum]

Been a while since I used workspaces but my understanding is that you have: - a directory that has the infrastructure code - a directory per environment that has the specific configuration to be applied to that environment

It's a pretty classic separation of code and config. Might not be intuitive to everyone I guess, but that separation is very beneficial I find.

For instance, adding a new environment is relatively trivial. Not something you do all the time granted, but I have had the need on occasions.

Same goes for removing an environment.

[memhole]

You described my pattern. I don’t care for it. I just don’t know what other pattern I could apply. It can get really messy and the code duplication is a headache. Humans don’t read the middle if that makes sense. So you’re having to keep a very keen eye on making the environment directories the same in my experience.

Things like terragrunt can be really helpful. I don’t use terraform without it.

[mjlee]

Performance. I've seen workspaces with just a thousand resources take 30 minutes to plan and apply. That's a pretty reasonable number to get to if you have per developer or per customer environments, or deploy infrastructure to multiple regions.

[_joel]

They seem to play nicer with Terraform Cloud, when I've used it. I'm not sure how useful they are if it's just vanilla tf, especially if your codebase is simple. I guess it's just extra isolation for safety, perhaps.