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I'm frankly really confused that Terraform is still so widely used for AWS IaC when CDK exists.

by rajamaka 5y ago

Aeolun 5y ago
CDK still uses cloudformation under the hood right? Anything to do with CF gets a hard pass from me.
- leetrout 5y ago
  Credit where credit is due CF is better than it used to be. Of course just like TF doesn't rollback CF will rollback and on an initial deploy you get in this weird state where you have to completely remove your stack to try again. But it was significantly faster than it used to be. I never want to use it tho.
  - mwarkentin 5y ago
    They actually released support for retrying failed stack updates the other week: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-for-aws-cloudformation-quickly-retry-stack-operations-from-the-point-of-failure/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-for-aws-cloudformation-...
    - Aeolun 5y ago
      Well, that’s only 5 years too late to make me consider it :P The situation where anything goes wrong, and you just sit there staring at CF being unable to delete some S3 bucket for hours, eventually going into the console manually and deleting it in one second. Has left me really sour on the whole thing.
verdverm 5y ago
One reason is because TF supports many clouds and people like having skills that are not vendor specific
- hckr1292 5y ago
  Half true. The true half is that terraform will work out of the box with basically all clouds and many saas vendors. The untrue half is that terraform does nothing to abstract away the underlying vendor. You cant treat gcp VMs the same as aws EC2 instances. You do get to reuse HCL.
  - verdverm 5y ago
    true, but the tooling and workflow remains the same. Not sure of any tool that could abstract the details sufficiently to be widely adopted. There is just too much nuance in cloud config. I'm exploring using CUE (https://cuelang.org https://cuelang.org) to define TF resources, exporting as JSON for TF. So far it's much nicer

I'm frankly really confused that Terraform is still so widely used for AWS IaC when CDK exists.

Aeolun 5y ago

CDK still uses cloudformation under the hood right? Anything to do with CF gets a hard pass from me.

leetrout 5y ago
Credit where credit is due CF is better than it used to be. Of course just like TF doesn't rollback CF will rollback and on an initial deploy you get in this weird state where you have to completely remove your stack to try again. But it was significantly faster than it used to be. I never want to use it tho.
- mwarkentin 5y ago
  They actually released support for retrying failed stack updates the other week: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-for-aws-cloudformation-quickly-retry-stack-operations-from-the-point-of-failure/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-for-aws-cloudformation-...
  - Aeolun 5y ago
    Well, that’s only 5 years too late to make me consider it :P The situation where anything goes wrong, and you just sit there staring at CF being unable to delete some S3 bucket for hours, eventually going into the console manually and deleting it in one second. Has left me really sour on the whole thing.

verdverm 5y ago

One reason is because TF supports many clouds and people like having skills that are not vendor specific

hckr1292 5y ago
Half true. The true half is that terraform will work out of the box with basically all clouds and many saas vendors. The untrue half is that terraform does nothing to abstract away the underlying vendor. You cant treat gcp VMs the same as aws EC2 instances. You do get to reuse HCL.
- verdverm 5y ago
  true, but the tooling and workflow remains the same. Not sure of any tool that could abstract the details sufficiently to be widely adopted. There is just too much nuance in cloud config. I'm exploring using CUE (https://cuelang.org https://cuelang.org) to define TF resources, exporting as JSON for TF. So far it's much nicer