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This is a very bold take on Infra management which has become a real PITA even at small orgs - Cloud really did a number on us. One thing I'm personally wonder

This is a very bold take on Infra management which has become a real PITA even at small orgs - Cloud really did a number on us. One thing I'm personally wondering about is whether I can import my Terraform state file - because that'd be a pretty good starting point for many orgs. Regardless, I'm curious how this pans out. Though we've had a few different iterations of IaC in the past decade or so, the infra crowd has been known for being sceptical when it comes to adopting new things than your usual software engineer, especially something that is more like a step change than a gradual evolution. Very happy someone's taking on this task with a very fresh approach.

holoway 2y ago
You can't import terraform state right now. High on the road map (https://docs.systeminit.com/roadmap https://docs.systeminit.com/roadmap) is discovery of existing resources, starting with the import of individual things, and eventually building the component backwards from discovering the resources. We think that'll be better than importing terraform state, because it will essentially be a rolling reflection of the output, rather than trying to back into it from terraform. But we're 100% open to importing it from the state file if that's what folks need.
- gyre007 2y ago
  I would be fine with discovering the existing resources actually, if SI can do that. The reason I mentioned Terraform is because my infrastructure is fully managed by it so I thought that would be the easiest path, but if SI can automagically discover all the resources that’d work just fune for us. Thanks, need to give it (SI) a go!
  - holoway 2y ago
    This worked in a previous version of SI (we've built like 4 different versions of it over the years) - but we haven't brough it back in to the current version yet. But we absolutely will!
- lazzurs 2y ago
  Importing from the state would be good. Doing this with resources is going to be the easy path. Translating the state representation of re-usable modules I expect is going to be more difficult but necessary for the migration path to be useful. A lot of power in Terraform is being able to stack re-usable components, say an internal module representing a service on top of a public module that provides sensible defaults like the terraform-aws-modules collection which then sits on top of resources. If you can get this to a place where an existing deployment of Terraform modules can be imported into SI as a collection of re-usable templates and then users can easily deploy n+1 of those templates the same way they would do with Terraform I think you will have an easy migration path. If not importing from the state at least some way of automatically importing those re-usable components and allowing the deployment of n+1 of a reusable component would be helpful to migration from existing patterns.

holoway 2y ago

You can't import terraform state right now. High on the road map (https://docs.systeminit.com/roadmap https://docs.systeminit.com/roadmap) is discovery of existing resources, starting with the import of individual things, and eventually building the component backwards from discovering the resources. We think that'll be better than importing terraform state, because it will essentially be a rolling reflection of the output, rather than trying to back into it from terraform. But we're 100% open to importing it from the state file if that's what folks need.

gyre007 2y ago
I would be fine with discovering the existing resources actually, if SI can do that. The reason I mentioned Terraform is because my infrastructure is fully managed by it so I thought that would be the easiest path, but if SI can automagically discover all the resources that’d work just fune for us. Thanks, need to give it (SI) a go!
- holoway 2y ago
  This worked in a previous version of SI (we've built like 4 different versions of it over the years) - but we haven't brough it back in to the current version yet. But we absolutely will!
lazzurs 2y ago
Importing from the state would be good. Doing this with resources is going to be the easy path. Translating the state representation of re-usable modules I expect is going to be more difficult but necessary for the migration path to be useful. A lot of power in Terraform is being able to stack re-usable components, say an internal module representing a service on top of a public module that provides sensible defaults like the terraform-aws-modules collection which then sits on top of resources. If you can get this to a place where an existing deployment of Terraform modules can be imported into SI as a collection of re-usable templates and then users can easily deploy n+1 of those templates the same way they would do with Terraform I think you will have an easy migration path. If not importing from the state at least some way of automatically importing those re-usable components and allowing the deployment of n+1 of a reusable component would be helpful to migration from existing patterns.