Terraform also knows how to orchestrate those API calls in dependency order, update in place when possible or else recreate (reusing the cloud platform’s unique

Terraform also knows how to orchestrate those API calls in dependency order, update in place when possible or else recreate (reusing the cloud platform’s unique ID from creating each resource), and check for drift (because sometimes people alter the actual cloud resource but not the template file). The problem is that some cloud APIs require a lot of boilerplate params to set up correctly (looking at you, aws_appautoscaling_policy), and HCL’s unit of reuse makes it fairly hard to factor out what our resources have in common and end up with template files clear enough for a reviewer to catch mistakes.