> [The AMI management tools] exposed just what one needs to achieve while hiding anything about how things were done No, they exposed just what _someone workin

> [The AMI management tools] exposed just what one needs to achieve while hiding anything about how things were done No, they exposed just what _someone working at Netflix who produces AMIs for Netflix's infrastructure and is required to conform to assorted Netflix expectations lest they be told to go pound sand_ needs. Accepting that constraint makes the problem much easier. When you try to make a general-purpose tool, you rapidly run up against: - Some other user needs to do something that you don't, that the existing configuration surface cannot possibly account for. You now have either a tool that exposes two (and soon, three or four or five ad infinitum) means of doing thing (likely without any indication why you'd use one or the other) or a tool that exposes <original means of doing thing> and <fill in your own thing from scratch>. - Someone has other parts of their infrastructure whose design is, for lack of a better description, "fucking stupid". They don't have the power or will to change that, but they're happy to ask you to include a workaround for it in your product. They also have a number of friends whose surrounding infrastructure is similarly fucking stupid, and some of those are important contracts where sales will force your hand to build the workaround instead of asking the customer not do fucking stupid things. Yes, a single well-managed organization can delegate various pieces of complexity throughout the org and avoid having other parts worry about them. General-purpose tools do not have that complexity. The reason you have to learn new concepts and tools to learn Terraform effectively is because you're taking all the complexity of dealing with a cloud services provider and then adding an additional layer of complexity on top to augment the things you can do with the cloud provider. The value proposition is that this still better than what you'd do by hand and, crucially, something that other people who know Terraform can understand. Realistically, you can hire another engineer who's familiar with Terraform. You can't clone Matt.