4 ms·

I haven't done a lot of infrastructure work in the past few years so haven't stayed super on top of the latest changes. I last used it heavily in the earlier da

by cactus2093 5y ago

I haven't done a lot of infrastructure work in the past few years so haven't stayed super on top of the latest changes. I last used it heavily in the earlier days, roughly 4-7 years ago now. And while a lot of the community was great, put in a lot of work on the product, and generally wanted to improve the tool, there were also a lot of very vocal stodgy old timers that were really resistant to any improvements from the very earliest days. It definitely rubbed me the wrong way at times and made me want to look at alternatives. I remember some old threads about loops for instance, and a lot of the core community was fully convinced that it was a terrible idea, nobody should ever need loops, and if you're a complete weirdo who does want them you should just use a separate templating language to generate your terraform configs instead. And when modules were first released, the support for using them as a means of local code encapsulation and reuse was pretty weak (it would for some reason hard-code absolute file paths in the tfstate file IIRC, so if one person ran a terraform plan on a state file somebody else had last pushed it would always show up as needing to be changed even if it was already up to date). Again I remember core developers insisting that nobody needs features for local code reuse, and modules are only needed for publishing public resources that others can pull in. Anyway, by no means do I hate Terraform, but I definitely associate it with being unnecessarily clunky and convoluted and full of gotchas even for fairly common use cases. In my opinion that reputation is pretty deserved and built up over probably a hundred hours of experience struggling with it a few years ago. I'm glad to hear that it sounds like that is changing, but I'd still be very cautious and carefully evaluate all the newer alternatives before rushing back to use it again.

mtalantikite 5y ago
Things have changed since you last used it 4 years ago, so it's probably unfair to judge the tool now based on how it operated then. Most of these pain points (code reuse, state management, more robust HCL features) have been addressed. The one major thing I'd like to see are better LSP bindings for IDE support. Terraform has been a great tool and it's always surprising to me to hear people hating on it.
- cactus2093 5y ago
  It's a fine tool, but all the other comments as peers of mine highlight the same kinds of issues I mentioned and got completed downvoted for. So clearly there is something to it. Nobody is hating on Terraform, just trying to avoid choosing a tool that makes their job more difficult than alternatives.
jen20 5y ago
> very vocal stodgy old timers that were really resistant to any improvements from the very earliest days As one of the three maintainers of Terraform (for the core and all providers) in that time frame, your characterisation is not particularly accurate - likely hence the downvotes. Many of the “suggestions” in that time frame were “we should do something and ‘X’ is something so we should do ‘X’” - which is to a large extent how TF came into being. From the earliest days, breaking changes were avoided - policy which was not retained through later versions. While you may have heard some “core developers” claim that reuse was unnecessary (I can’t claim omnipresence), the HashiCorp official training that I taught during that time period _used modules extensively_ for this.

mtalantikite 5y ago

Things have changed since you last used it 4 years ago, so it's probably unfair to judge the tool now based on how it operated then. Most of these pain points (code reuse, state management, more robust HCL features) have been addressed. The one major thing I'd like to see are better LSP bindings for IDE support. Terraform has been a great tool and it's always surprising to me to hear people hating on it.

cactus2093 5y ago
It's a fine tool, but all the other comments as peers of mine highlight the same kinds of issues I mentioned and got completed downvoted for. So clearly there is something to it. Nobody is hating on Terraform, just trying to avoid choosing a tool that makes their job more difficult than alternatives.

jen20 5y ago

> very vocal stodgy old timers that were really resistant to any improvements from the very earliest days As one of the three maintainers of Terraform (for the core and all providers) in that time frame, your characterisation is not particularly accurate - likely hence the downvotes. Many of the “suggestions” in that time frame were “we should do something and ‘X’ is something so we should do ‘X’” - which is to a large extent how TF came into being. From the earliest days, breaking changes were avoided - policy which was not retained through later versions. While you may have heard some “core developers” claim that reuse was unnecessary (I can’t claim omnipresence), the HashiCorp official training that I taught during that time period _used modules extensively_ for this.