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What’s the plan for dealing with the Terraform CDK?
by dhess 3y ago
What’s the plan for dealing with the Terraform CDK?
- bilalq 3y agoThis is a big question for me. The CDK style form of authoring IaC is way better than config files in HCL/YML/JSON. It has some rough edges and I do wish it wasn't so gung-ho on the magical object-oriented constructor side-effects, but it's still a net improvement. CDKTF looks promising. How will OpenTF interplay with it?
- fishnchips 3y agoI'm not into the CDK at all to be honest but isn't it a glorified preprocessor that generates the JSON representation of Terraform input, which is then processed as usual by your regular Terraform binary?
- Coryodaniel 3y agoThis is correct. TFCDK is also MPL (for now?). You will be able to generate tfjson w tfcdk and execute it with opentf
- paulddraper 3y agoYes. But a preprocessor that deserves the glory. Imagine writing in a real programming language, with real variables, loops, function calls, etc. And then imagine trying to use HCL instead.
- fishnchips 3y agoTo each his own I guess. I personally like the HTML-like mental model that HCL gives me. In a sense not being a programming language is to me a benefit. If anything, I'd love to see an equivalent of CSS to Terraform - an idea someone smarter than me was floating not so long ago. Decoupling structure from specifics - I can see a well thought-out implementation of this concept actually taking off. Re: programming languages... I love programming. Just not my infra.
- paulddraper 3y agoHTML is a wonderful example. Very few applications built as HTML. Always some templating language/process on top of it.
- fishnchips 3y agoTouche.
- spicyusername 3y agoSounds like a recipe for hard to read, bespoke, spaghetti to me. One of the benefits to HCL is standardization. Every terraform module looks exactly the same as every other module.
- paulddraper 3y agoFar from it, it's familiar, succinct, and well structured. There's a reason Cloudformation added CDK, and Pulumni only uses mainstream languages.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]