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Is "remained stateless" accurate? The document only indicates that they used to try storing state in tags, not that it was stateless. "Stateless", to me, would

Is "remained stateless" accurate? The document only indicates that they used to try storing state in tags, not that it was stateless. "Stateless", to me, would mean that it tries to compare current resources with your current configuration without any metadata. If you mean that they should have tried to keep using tags, not every resource and cloud provider supporting tags pretty much ends the possibility of that. If you mean they should have gone completely stateless, I would say that state is great for detecting configuration drift. If Terraform tries to create a new resource, is it being created for the first time, or was it manually removed? You can only tell with state. Sure, you can get this information in a number of other ways, but one of the major strengths of Terraform is as an easy drift detection tool. I get the desire for state not to exist, but in reality it is essential for what Terraform does.

raffraffraff 4y ago
It's not a drift detection tool for resources that are manually created.
- rbongers 4y ago
  Are you saying it should? I think whether that's desirable or not is a matter of preference. The nice thing about Terraform is that you don't have to go all in. I don't really want to have to tell it to ignore every resource that I want to manually manage, and I don't want it wasting the extra API calls on trying to find every resource that's not in my configuration every time I want to deploy. Now, if they provided a separate tool for detecting manually created resources, that would be awesome, but it wouldn't fit into the typical flow of showing drift regularly just before deploying in my opinion. That's more about detecting whether you're about to overwrite something that was manually done, or if you're about to make changes assuming your infrastructure is as you last left it. I don't need to take inventory of every single resource I have every time before deploying.
  - raffraffraff 4y ago
    Not suggesting it "should", I was just pointing out that it's not a complete drift detection tool.
    - jen20 4y ago
      That was a deliberate choice made. Terraform development has a cardinal rule: do not touch objects you did not create. It could do drift detection for existence rather easily if that was relaxed, but the rule follows the principle of least surprise.

raffraffraff 4y ago

It's not a drift detection tool for resources that are manually created.

rbongers 4y ago
Are you saying it should? I think whether that's desirable or not is a matter of preference. The nice thing about Terraform is that you don't have to go all in. I don't really want to have to tell it to ignore every resource that I want to manually manage, and I don't want it wasting the extra API calls on trying to find every resource that's not in my configuration every time I want to deploy. Now, if they provided a separate tool for detecting manually created resources, that would be awesome, but it wouldn't fit into the typical flow of showing drift regularly just before deploying in my opinion. That's more about detecting whether you're about to overwrite something that was manually done, or if you're about to make changes assuming your infrastructure is as you last left it. I don't need to take inventory of every single resource I have every time before deploying.
- raffraffraff 4y ago
  Not suggesting it "should", I was just pointing out that it's not a complete drift detection tool.
  - jen20 4y ago
    That was a deliberate choice made. Terraform development has a cardinal rule: do not touch objects you did not create. It could do drift detection for existence rather easily if that was relaxed, but the rule follows the principle of least surprise.