Terraform is pretty awful for Continuous Delivery. I inherited a deployment system were new app versions were deployed with Terraform, and I did quite a lot of

Terraform is pretty awful for Continuous Delivery. I inherited a deployment system were new app versions were deployed with Terraform, and I did quite a lot of automation to make it not totally suck from a workflow perspective, not it's still not the right tool. Devs should be able to merge a PR, and have it safely rollout to production (e.g., canary), possibly with a staging step and manual promotion if desired. They should have a simple ability to rollback to a previous version. Terraform typically would involve editing TF files to update a version, committing that TF change, opening and merge a PR for the change. The running plan, reading the output of plan, then applying the plan. If you have staging and stable environments, repeat the steps. If you want to rollback, repeat the steps. And it gets oh so much more complex. TF binary versions need to be globally consistent, because the version is stored in the state file. You basically need to only run TF from the CI/CD system, people can't be allowed to run apply locally because they might use a newer version of TF which would then break CI/CD which has the older version. So then you wrap TF commands with a Makefile that checks TF version, or you pin the TF version within the TF code. How many resources are you managing? Hundreds? Thousands? How many apps? Are they all deployed using the same state file? How long does it take to run a plan and apply? 10 minutes? 20 minutes? Same for a rollback... What if Bob want to deploy version 13 of app 'foo', but when he runs plan it says it will also update app 'bar' to version 27. But Bob doesn't know anything about bar, his team only works on foo. So you break up the TF files so every app has its own state file. Cool. But now you need to upgrade TF itself. And it is a major upgrade. Now you need to update the TF version pinned in the source files, and update the build servers to have the new TF, and run a TF command to upgrade on every state file. Then you start adding symlinks into the TF source tree, because TF doesn't have any sane way to reuse code. But there are slight changes that need to be made for each app, and TF doesn't allow variables in some parts of the code, and modules are OK be still too verbose, and you still end up with places you can't use variables. So no you start using templates to write you TF code, so you can reuse code, because 99% is the same for each app. Ugh. Terraform is great for defining infrastructure that rarely changes, and is managed by an infrastructure team. When you are trying to use it for app deployments, which happen multiple times a day, and are handles by app devs, it is a royal PITA.