[cruffle_duffle]

Terraform is such a weird product and it’s hard to describe why, really. It has really awesome things about it like a functional way to pull in support for just about any providers crazy thing. And the crazy part is somehow terraform can easily configure local infrastructure, cloud infrastructure on almost any host, set up repos in GitHub, and then create a new auth provider in Auth0. The language is flexible enough to support all of it.

Yet as a language, it’s quirky as heck. For example how modules are basically wrappers on providers and how different modules can all most “see inside” other modules to iron out dependency ordering but yet also can’t. And speaking of, circular dependencies suck to work around in a modular way without tearing half your structure apart.

Like I said, I am not anywhere close to an expert on terraform and can only describe my limited experience building a fairly simple stack on top of it. The whole thing is just… both amazing and also weird and a bit frustrating. And I have yet to “grow” into multiple environments… lots of my complaints are probably down to my limited experience with it and, honestly, not much out there in terms of best practices for maintaining scalable configuration (or maybe my ADD brain refuses to dive into that, who knows?)

My last adventure into infrastructure as code was with Puppet and Salt. All of that was provisioning on top of bare metal. It was all file operations and the “provider specific modules” were really just wrappers to nicely encapsulate things like nginx or apt. Perhaps it is because of Puppet or Salt’s much more limited scope that didn’t have me feeling the same way.

I mean terraform can be used to configure just about anything that has an API if you wanted. Maintaining a declarative language around that is bound to have its quirks.