terraform second impressions

thoughts on terraform after using it for a few more things

SEAN K.H. LIAO

terraform second impressions

thoughts on terraform after using it for a few more things

terraform

Control anything with an API.

pain points

Terraform is good for spinning up new things, or changing a few key values. Less nice for managing something that already exists, since you have to hunt down the things that already exist and try to write a matching config.

google/google-beta provider specific complaints: google-managed service accounts aren't importable or manageable through terraform, best you can do is record their email as a variable and manage iam bindings. iam policies feel all over the place. cloud run requires setting an image, but this changes every time you release a new version, making it unsafe to re-apply config especially if you have CI/CD setup

azure devops complaints: anything touching github from the service connection to setting up a build definition to trigger on github push doesn't work. Things like secure files aren't even available. Having terraform only manage half your stuff seems worse than all-or-nothing.

github complaints: pretty much useless, when thing i want to do most is move/rename repos

hcl complaints: the block vs map syntax makes the language feel inconsistent.