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Doing all of that is my job and you are 1000% correct. I will always have job security now because of how ridiculously over-complicated, clunky, rigid, flaky, a

Doing all of that is my job and you are 1000% correct. I will always have job security now because of how ridiculously over-complicated, clunky, rigid, flaky, and bizarre all the DevOps tools are. K8s Admin is now the new DBA. Writing Terraform is a programming job in itself. It's like somebody decided we don't have enough useless people in tech so they made all this new tech be more annoying than it has to be. We could probably replace it all with a couple shell scripts and it'd work just as well.

oceanplexian 5y ago
To add to that, I find very few engineers actually "writing" anything in these IaC languages. It's like a big game of copy/paste where people simply keep repeating bad patterns that use a library that uses an API they don't understand, maintained by someone working at a cloud provider who barely understands how their own service works. Like, there are so many turtles all the way down, when you see this happen long enough it drives you crazy.
- Traubenfuchs 5y ago
  I am like that. To get new applications working in my company, I have to run a proprietary shell script that creates about 20 terraform files that I then later have to manually adapt via copy and pasting. Then I have to enter several configs/settings into our config server, etc. In the first company I ever worked for, we could run one-click jobs that would build and deploy .war packed applications to our tomcats instead. They were based on 1) building the application with mvn and 2) pushing the .war to the tomcats. Each version was running in parallel, the version agnostic path routing could to the relevant version could be set via dropdown.
  - notreallyserio 5y ago
    > I have to run a proprietary shell script that creates about 20 terraform files that I then later have to manually adapt via copy and pasting. Would it be possible to replace this with modules and variables? I've done this a few times although my scale is incredibly small at the moment.
    - throwaway984393 5y ago
      Yes and no. There's a diminishing return after a certain amount of modules and variables. It's because the tool is shitty and limited. For example there's no such thing as inherited or global variables between Terraform modules, you have to explicitly pass them, or else pass these clunky object variables that embed lots of data and types but not the actual variable concept. And at the end of the day you need one final root module which requires a bunch of files, so you might as well use a template.
Traubenfuchs 5y ago
Thanks for the self awareness. I do not hate devops engineers, I am fully onboard with engineering for job security, but I am against anonymously pretending it's anything but.

oceanplexian 5y ago

To add to that, I find very few engineers actually "writing" anything in these IaC languages. It's like a big game of copy/paste where people simply keep repeating bad patterns that use a library that uses an API they don't understand, maintained by someone working at a cloud provider who barely understands how their own service works. Like, there are so many turtles all the way down, when you see this happen long enough it drives you crazy.

Traubenfuchs 5y ago
I am like that. To get new applications working in my company, I have to run a proprietary shell script that creates about 20 terraform files that I then later have to manually adapt via copy and pasting. Then I have to enter several configs/settings into our config server, etc. In the first company I ever worked for, we could run one-click jobs that would build and deploy .war packed applications to our tomcats instead. They were based on 1) building the application with mvn and 2) pushing the .war to the tomcats. Each version was running in parallel, the version agnostic path routing could to the relevant version could be set via dropdown.
- notreallyserio 5y ago
  > I have to run a proprietary shell script that creates about 20 terraform files that I then later have to manually adapt via copy and pasting. Would it be possible to replace this with modules and variables? I've done this a few times although my scale is incredibly small at the moment.
  - throwaway984393 5y ago
    Yes and no. There's a diminishing return after a certain amount of modules and variables. It's because the tool is shitty and limited. For example there's no such thing as inherited or global variables between Terraform modules, you have to explicitly pass them, or else pass these clunky object variables that embed lots of data and types but not the actual variable concept. And at the end of the day you need one final root module which requires a bunch of files, so you might as well use a template.

Traubenfuchs 5y ago

Thanks for the self awareness. I do not hate devops engineers, I am fully onboard with engineering for job security, but I am against anonymously pretending it's anything but.