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I realize terraform turned 1.0 recently but I still harbor a lot of anger towards them for 0.11 to 1.0. They were selling support and enterprise features and co

I realize terraform turned 1.0 recently but I still harbor a lot of anger towards them for 0.11 to 1.0. They were selling support and enterprise features and convinced everyone to go all on on terraform and the result was pure hell getting from minor version to minor version. Upgrade fatigue set in hard in my org and I still have teams I stumble across sitting on 0.9 and refusing to upgrade. The only pass terraform gets is that it was the least worst of IaC at the time. And even now in the day of k8s, on-cluster CI/CD, and AWS-account-per-team, something has to provide the initial k8s cluster, VPC, Client VPN, etc. before your devs can use an account.

busterarm 5y ago
Uhh...I've been using Terraform at very large scale since 0.7, without Enterprise, and the only truly painful upgrade in this chain was 0.11 to 0.12. There might have been some pain in specific providers, but at the same time those updates were going on, all three major cloud providers rewrote their own APIs. Everything since 0.12 has been literal sunshine and rainbows flying out of our butts. The tool is _that good_ now.
- krinchan 5y ago
  We have an internal provider that handles generation of IAM Roles and IAM users via an external API for various security reasons I may or may not agree with. The constant provider changes in 0.10 and upward were extremely painful. We actually ended up having several teams who so hopelessly fubared their tfstates trying to skip minor releases, we ended up having to take it away and put together a task force to do it ourselves across almost 200 repositories. I’m not sure what you mean by “all three major cloud providers rewrote their own APIs.” Azure[1][2], AWS[3], and Google[4] are all maintained by Hashicorp. In fact, if you peruse the issues you’ll often see PRs opened by employees of the respective providers trying to fix blocking issues and they often devolve into literal begging for Hashicorp to respond and at least tell them why something hasn’t been merged. I know one blocker[5] actually cost Azure a very substantial customer as it languished in Hashicorp’s queue. Hashicorp’s constant refrain of “Well it’s a 0 version software” while selling enterprise support and constantly shilling their wares as production ready across the entire DevOps space was dishonest. I appreciate the position they were in and I appreciate even more their attempt to at least put out a good PR move with their 1.0 release. We will see how well it holds up over the years. What you call “that good” I call “better than everything else but still byzantine and hellish to deal with every time someone DMs me, ‘hey, you know terraform right?’” 1: https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform-provider-azuread https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform-provider-azuread 2: https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform-provider-azurerm https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform-provider-azurerm 3: https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform-provider-aws https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform-provider-aws 4: https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform-provider-google https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform-provider-google 5: https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform-provider-azurerm/pull/5485#issuecomment-591608953 https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform-provider-azurerm/pull...
  - busterarm 5y ago
    Yes, you're complaining about provider problems. All terraform does is translate HCL into commands against the providers' own APIs. Right around the transition periods between 0.11 through 0.14, AWS, Google and Azure were rewriting large sections of their own public-facing APIs, changing tons of behaviors and then rewriting their Terraform providers to match the API changes. That's an issue with those providers' APIs and how their Terraform provider was architected. Most of the other Terraform providers were smooth-sailing during the same period, save for the major challenges involved in updating 0.11 to 0.12. You're putting the blame in the wrong place. In the case of all three of those cloud providers, the companies' own employees plus outside contributors maintain the terraform providers, not HashiCorp. HashiCorp gets involved but mostly to resolve errors in Terraform itself. Saying they are maintained by HashiCorp is completely incorrect. They are part of HashiCorp's repos (because they are official) but in each case the core contributors are people from AWS, Azure and Google. My company has large accounts with all of these, I contribute to them myself and I know(/knew. Dana @ Google moved onto another role and Google hasn't introduced me to her replacements yet) the maintainers of all of them personally. Don't look at who owns the repo, look at the contributor lists.
    - krinchan 5y ago
      I don’t see why I, the end user, should be forced to make that differentiation since Terraform is effectively useless without the providers from the big three. Statements like “you’re blaming the wrong people” is in the same spirit as what ZeroVer is lampooning. Like yes, our internal provider was a pain point and we own that but the rest of the drama around providers was just weird. The work to move over 200 repositories through the hoops to keep them updated, especially mature services that may not have been deployed for several months, was difficult to automate and very brittle even when it was. It broke down at scale and really no one should have been using it that wide spread before it was 1.0. Hashicorp’s whole treatment of terraform 0.x was horrendous and constantly broke everything, all while they said it was production ready. You can blame whoever you want but the total lack of stability and easy upgrade paths and constant manual fiddling and reviewing output from ‘upgrade0.11’ type commands was ridiculous and a massive time sink for our org.

busterarm 5y ago

Uhh...I've been using Terraform at very large scale since 0.7, without Enterprise, and the only truly painful upgrade in this chain was 0.11 to 0.12. There might have been some pain in specific providers, but at the same time those updates were going on, all three major cloud providers rewrote their own APIs. Everything since 0.12 has been literal sunshine and rainbows flying out of our butts. The tool is _that good_ now.

krinchan 5y ago
We have an internal provider that handles generation of IAM Roles and IAM users via an external API for various security reasons I may or may not agree with. The constant provider changes in 0.10 and upward were extremely painful. We actually ended up having several teams who so hopelessly fubared their tfstates trying to skip minor releases, we ended up having to take it away and put together a task force to do it ourselves across almost 200 repositories. I’m not sure what you mean by “all three major cloud providers rewrote their own APIs.” Azure[1][2], AWS[3], and Google[4] are all maintained by Hashicorp. In fact, if you peruse the issues you’ll often see PRs opened by employees of the respective providers trying to fix blocking issues and they often devolve into literal begging for Hashicorp to respond and at least tell them why something hasn’t been merged. I know one blocker[5] actually cost Azure a very substantial customer as it languished in Hashicorp’s queue. Hashicorp’s constant refrain of “Well it’s a 0 version software” while selling enterprise support and constantly shilling their wares as production ready across the entire DevOps space was dishonest. I appreciate the position they were in and I appreciate even more their attempt to at least put out a good PR move with their 1.0 release. We will see how well it holds up over the years. What you call “that good” I call “better than everything else but still byzantine and hellish to deal with every time someone DMs me, ‘hey, you know terraform right?’” 1: https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform-provider-azuread https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform-provider-azuread 2: https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform-provider-azurerm https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform-provider-azurerm 3: https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform-provider-aws https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform-provider-aws 4: https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform-provider-google https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform-provider-google 5: https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform-provider-azurerm/pull/5485#issuecomment-591608953 https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform-provider-azurerm/pull...
- busterarm 5y ago
  Yes, you're complaining about provider problems. All terraform does is translate HCL into commands against the providers' own APIs. Right around the transition periods between 0.11 through 0.14, AWS, Google and Azure were rewriting large sections of their own public-facing APIs, changing tons of behaviors and then rewriting their Terraform providers to match the API changes. That's an issue with those providers' APIs and how their Terraform provider was architected. Most of the other Terraform providers were smooth-sailing during the same period, save for the major challenges involved in updating 0.11 to 0.12. You're putting the blame in the wrong place. In the case of all three of those cloud providers, the companies' own employees plus outside contributors maintain the terraform providers, not HashiCorp. HashiCorp gets involved but mostly to resolve errors in Terraform itself. Saying they are maintained by HashiCorp is completely incorrect. They are part of HashiCorp's repos (because they are official) but in each case the core contributors are people from AWS, Azure and Google. My company has large accounts with all of these, I contribute to them myself and I know(/knew. Dana @ Google moved onto another role and Google hasn't introduced me to her replacements yet) the maintainers of all of them personally. Don't look at who owns the repo, look at the contributor lists.
  - krinchan 5y ago
    I don’t see why I, the end user, should be forced to make that differentiation since Terraform is effectively useless without the providers from the big three. Statements like “you’re blaming the wrong people” is in the same spirit as what ZeroVer is lampooning. Like yes, our internal provider was a pain point and we own that but the rest of the drama around providers was just weird. The work to move over 200 repositories through the hoops to keep them updated, especially mature services that may not have been deployed for several months, was difficult to automate and very brittle even when it was. It broke down at scale and really no one should have been using it that wide spread before it was 1.0. Hashicorp’s whole treatment of terraform 0.x was horrendous and constantly broke everything, all while they said it was production ready. You can blame whoever you want but the total lack of stability and easy upgrade paths and constant manual fiddling and reviewing output from ‘upgrade0.11’ type commands was ridiculous and a massive time sink for our org.