[donaldguy]

The major problem for me so far was/is, at the moment, it doesn't seem like there is any real transition plan; we have a bunch of existing instances, ASGs, ELBs, etc and it isn't really tenable to tear it all down and recreate from scratch just so we have this new way to manage it. (its possible, but not clearly worth it)

Initially looking at the docs I thought the refresh command (http://www.terraform.io/docs/commands/refresh.html) would provide this capability, but I wrote up a manifest matching a subset of our infrastructure and tried to refresh it to no avail.

It is possible that the changing of the state file to JSON in this version provides a clearer path, but it still seems too hard to start using it going forward if you aren't starting from scratch

[mitchellh]

This is a planned feature in the future, we're internally calling it "recovery mode" (but not sure what we'll call it when it releases).

The basic idea is that you can give it provider credentials and it'll discover resources, or you can tell it a specific resource, and it'll interactively ask you just enough about it to recreate the configuration.

Terraform 0.3 actually laid a lot of the foundation for this, but there is quite a bit more to go. We'll get there sooner rather than later, though.