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Thanks again! This viewpoint has a lot of merit for sure. Please let me defend my claim on Terraform capability though. The real question isn't whether doing X

Thanks again! This viewpoint has a lot of merit for sure. Please let me defend my claim on Terraform capability though. The real question isn't whether doing X is possible with TF; it's whether it's likely to be done in practice. I am speaking from my own experience as a former front-end dev and making a bold assumption that there are many others like me. Whenever I'm using Terraform, even ready-made modules, I find myself thinking of things that I neither want to be thinking about, nor I need to be thinking about. Most of my brainspace is occupied by frontend intricacies; however I still do want to get control of the entire stack. The further some tool is from my primary competence the less capacity I have for various details about it. I want my webapps and containers to work somewhere, that's all. But when I'm facing a problem - a specific problem - I also want it to be solvable. Like autoscaling or load balancing. And I want it to be solvable in a way that's not against industry best practices. Because today I may have a team of 3 but in a couple years that may be a team of 300. I don't want to have to rebuild from scratch half way through. But I also don't want to waste time building something future-proof on day 1.

embik 5y ago
I get what you're saying and I think it's a valuable discussion to have (I remain skeptical whether handing off your infrastructure design is a good idea or not; but as someone working in the space I might be biased), but that's not my really my point to be honest. I think that the documentation is making several technical claims (from the quotes I've provided) that are factually false. You're agreeing that it CAN be done with Terraform. Best practice isn't what is being discussed in the documentation, it claims that reusing isn't possible. Granted, I'm not your target audience, but I would recommend to a) rephrase those claims so they're closer to the truth and b) start documenting the architecture of your targets and the quality of your Terraform code (does it pass tfsec tests for example). If someone asked me to review this product for their startup, I would primarily see Terraform modules with unknown quality or architecture.
- igorzij 5y ago
  That's superbly helpful! Thank you so much!! We've taken note and will be working on improving docs and architecture transparency.

embik 5y ago

I get what you're saying and I think it's a valuable discussion to have (I remain skeptical whether handing off your infrastructure design is a good idea or not; but as someone working in the space I might be biased), but that's not my really my point to be honest. I think that the documentation is making several technical claims (from the quotes I've provided) that are factually false. You're agreeing that it CAN be done with Terraform. Best practice isn't what is being discussed in the documentation, it claims that reusing isn't possible. Granted, I'm not your target audience, but I would recommend to a) rephrase those claims so they're closer to the truth and b) start documenting the architecture of your targets and the quality of your Terraform code (does it pass tfsec tests for example). If someone asked me to review this product for their startup, I would primarily see Terraform modules with unknown quality or architecture.

igorzij 5y ago
That's superbly helpful! Thank you so much!! We've taken note and will be working on improving docs and architecture transparency.