11 ms·

Terraform

• pdenya 12y ago
  This is a devops tool named Terraform, nothing to do with terraforming.
  • deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
    • thebyrd 12y ago
      no
  • adamnemecek 12y ago
    What? Facebook is not an actual book?
    • bdcravens 12y ago
      You have no clue how shocked I was to find that Paul Graham's YCombinator wasn't a math formula.
      • uptown 12y ago
        I funded the Reading Rainbow Kickstarter. I was shocked and dismayed to learn that no portion of the funding would be used to teach rainbows how to read.
  • na85 12y ago
    It's the new thing. Pick a noun or verb that's only marginally-related (or sometimes not even remotely related) to your product and take ownership of it. Like Aerospike, or Uber.
    • jlmorton 12y ago
      To be fair, Uber was originally UberCab, but dropped "Cab" from the name after the MTA in San Francisco charged Uber with running an unlicensed taxi service.
    • jkaunisv1 12y ago
      At least Uber connotes that it's better than the competition. I was shocked to find out the other day about a CSS framework called Inuit. The mascot is a little inuit guy in a parka. Terraform seems much better in comparison.
      • dictum 12y ago
        You were shocked, shocked that someone would want to add a little bit of whimsy to an otherwise mundane thing as a CSS framework?
        • jkaunisv1 12y ago
          No, I was shocked they would appropriate a minority culture's name and caricature for their unrelated tech thingy.
    • icebraining 12y ago
      Is it any worse than taking control of a surname? Every MacDonald is now indelibly linked to awful burgers. At least rocket engines don't feel shame.
      • na85 12y ago
        Yes, actually. McDonald's was at least started by two guys with the surname McDonald. It is/was their company so they named it after themselves. That's no different than "Frank's Burger Stand", which is again completely different than writing a clone of GCC in javascript and then calling it Patriot or something.
    • oftenwrong 12y ago
      Then take the noun and use it on its own as a headline so HN readers don't know what your product is until they follow the link.
• fideloper 12y ago
  Feels like a big meta tool! It reads like you can use any provisioning software, use any server provider supported, use any DNS provider supported, you just need to write a bunch of configuration. I think I like this, but it sounds complex :D
• onedognight 12y ago
  > The ~ before the Droplet means that Terraform will update the resource in-place, instead of destroying or recreating. Terraform is the first tool to have this feature of the tools which can be considered similar to Terraform While not multi-platform, AWS's Cloud Formation does just this, it takes as its input a stateless JSON description of a set of AWS resources and their dependencies. Given a change in the desired state, it will do its best to update resources rather than creating them from scratch when possible.
  • mitchellh 12y ago
    Yes, but CloudFormation doesn't have Terraform's concept of an "execution plan"[1], which tells you what Terraform will do, before it does it. It is very easy with CloudFormation (especially as they get larger and more complex) to run into cases where CloudFormation unexpectedly destroys and recreates a resource, something that would never happen in Terraform because you would see it before it happened in the plan. There are more comparisons to CF here: http://www.terraform.io/intro/vs/cloudformation.html http://www.terraform.io/intro/vs/cloudformation.html [1]: http://www.terraform.io/docs/commands/plan.html http://www.terraform.io/docs/commands/plan.html
    • onedognight 12y ago
      That's sounds like a great feature; you are correct, one of the biggest pain points with Cloud Formation is the need to devine which actions will be taken in response to changes.
    • letmeinhere 12y ago
      This is a very nice feature, and I'm going to take a close look at Terraform. If you are already using cloudformation, I'd recommend applying stack policies that deny permission to "Update:Replace" or "Update:Delete" any resources. When you need to, you can use a one-time policy that lets you blow away specific resources, by name or type. http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuide/protect-stack-resources.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuid...
• diggan 12y ago
  Some read-worth links: Homepage - http://www.terraform.io/ http://www.terraform.io/ Introduction - http://www.terraform.io/intro/index.html http://www.terraform.io/intro/index.html Documentation - http://www.terraform.io/docs/index.html http://www.terraform.io/docs/index.html Sourcecode - https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform - Seems usable and I'm excited to try it out. I like the idea of "execution plans" and the declerative way of setting up the architecture.
  • ddevault 12y ago
    If any terraform folks are watching this, I have a little feedback on the home page. When I first got there, it wasn't apparent that I could scroll, and I thought I had to sit through the flashy animation before I could see anything. Was a little bit off-putting.
    • sah88 12y ago
      Also the skew/unskew on the #demo and #feature seems to cause font to render poorly on some browsers/OS combinations. Works fine in Firefox in Ubuntu. Chrome in Windows 7 is the worst with Chrome in Ubuntu being marginally better but still not rendering correctly. IE11 seemed to work fine in Windows 7. http://imgur.com/a/Wz87U http://imgur.com/a/Wz87U Top image is fixed and bottom image is what I get when I first visit the site. What is weird is that as soon as I remove the skew on the first feature bar (feature-auto) it clears up everything below it (all of the text within skewed elements looks weird). But if you re-enable the skew it distorts again. Also if remove the skew from the 2nd feature it will fix everything below it but not the stuff above and so on for the 3rd or the #demo.
• wernerb 12y ago
  I have been developing a tool that is almost the same called 'ozone.io'.. It leverages CMT tools such as puppet, ansible, chef. Not by writing plugins, but rather have users write or extend scripts called 'runners' that install and execute the CMT tool per node. You can checkout a prototype chef-solo runner at https://github.com/ozone-io/runner-chef-solo https://github.com/ozone-io/runner-chef-solo. Parallel deployment of multiple clusters is also covered. It too is handled by a directed acyclic graph based on dependencies on other clusters. I am on my own and I am writing it for my thesis which will come out pretty soon. It is created as an engine that expects cluster state. A sample input file can be seen here which is the only state you need to launch something. https://gist.github.com/wernerb/35a06e08a4d4e6cb02aa https://gist.github.com/wernerb/35a06e08a4d4e6cb02aa The whole thing works declaratively, so it converges your infrastructure to the desired state. By increasing the nodes for 'smallweb' it will undergo the steps defined in the cluster lifecycle. It will then also update the configuration of the nginx load balancer. As you can see each cluster is pinned to a provider/instanceprofile, and one of the things I am adding are affinity rules so the cluster deploys to multiple locations/providers. It is not ready to be opensourced but if any wants to see, contribute or see more I can give view access. What do you think?
  • sciurus 12y ago
    What type of resources does your tool manage? It actually doesn't sound that similar to what Terraform's providers manage, e.g. http://www.terraform.io/docs/providers/aws/index.html http://www.terraform.io/docs/providers/aws/index.html
    • wernerb 12y ago
      Actually, I've been reading and I might have jumped the gun.. Its programmer panic, sorry. You are right, it looks like a different type of system. I actually support all the providers Jclouds provides: Openstack Nova, rackspace, EC2, AWS-ec2.. more. Whats more ozone does not store any state, rather it stores it in a zookeeper/etcd cluster so you are in control of your meta-data.
• tvon 12y ago
  FWIW, I find the purple and blue here a bit painful to read: https://www.dropbox.com/s/0ki0m7967x5tvn6/Screenshot%202014-07-28%2015.01.34.png https://www.dropbox.com/s/0ki0m7967x5tvn6/Screenshot%202014-...
  • knd775 12y ago
    I don't have any issues with the colors, but I find the slight blurriness (aliasing?) to be a bit painful to read.That said, I love the design of the site otherwise. On another note, Terraform appears to be great. I cannot wait to try it out.
  • patja 12y ago
    The site suffers from the notorious Google font rendering defects in the Windows Chrome browser.
• cwp 12y ago
  How does this compare with Nixops or Disnix? It sounds like it would be possible to plug nix-based provisioning into Terraform, and use it to manage the high-level cluster structure. Edit: downvotes? whatever for?
  • cstrahan 12y ago
    I don't see the point of downvotes here... I have several production deployments of NixOS, and can't imagine using any other OS / package manager (supplemental utilities are fine, of course).
  • clord 12y ago
    I'm just starting off working with nixops. quite nice IMO, although not getting into the meat of it yet (i.e., trying real deployments). Nix solves the dependency problem really nicely, and I can spin up machines from scratch really fast. Also curious about comparisons here. If this is a tight implementation of something like nixops I am stoked.
• deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
• 616c 12y ago
  Mitchell, do you even sleep? Every time I see one of your tools, I feel like I need to pay you a hefty sum to teach me how to start coding productively, cuz Hashicorp output seems ferocious. Keep up the good work.
  • vhost- 12y ago
    I have the same thoughts. I can't tell you how many times I've said "I need to work there."
    • girvo 12y ago
      I literally just said that to my co-worker, haha. Amazing work, as always.
  • Ixiaus 12y ago
    I'm pretty sure a good portion of this output is also attributable to Armon.
  • mitchellh 12y ago
    Everyone at HashiCorp plays a key role in developing these tools. I couldn't do it by myself.
    • 616c 12y ago
      Well this will seem silly, but my bad. After looking at all your tools, I never looked at the HashiCorp site. I had no idea it was not a one man shop. I saw your last name and the branding on the project pages and I made a judgement a few years back. Should I have check my facts. Regardless, your software kicks ass. Thanks to you, and your team. Keep on trucking.
      • ryanthejuggler 12y ago
        I don't think it seems silly... VentureBeat [1] seems to think the same thing: Mitchell Hashimoto, the guy who created the popular Vagrant tool for setting up development environments, has gone and built another useful tool for developers working on public-cloud platforms. [1] http://venturebeat.com/2014/07/28/terraform-hashicorp/ http://venturebeat.com/2014/07/28/terraform-hashicorp/
• sciurus 12y ago
  It looks like Terraform is launching with decent coverage of AWS resources. Thinking of my own usage, the main ones missing are ElastiCache and CloudWatch. I'm not sure how you can setup a useful autoscaling group without the latter. EDIT: There's an issue tracking adding more at https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/issues/28 https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/issues/28
  • cheeseprocedure 12y ago
    Looks like you can't pass EC2 user-data to a launch config either, which is frustrating (I'm sure that'll be rapidly fixed, though): http://www.terraform.io/docs/providers/aws/r/launch_config.html http://www.terraform.io/docs/providers/aws/r/launch_config.h... https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/blob/9b0ba70537a440b3991557abcbba4768649f957d/builtin/providers/aws/resource_aws_launch_configuration.go#L191 https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/blob/9b0ba70537a440b3...
• earless1 12y ago
  This looks like a great tool. I was going to use CloudFormation to setup a new VPC in AWS, but I will give this a shot instead.
• mahmoudimus 12y ago
  One of the main strengths of something like cloudformation, is that we can use libraries in languages we're comfortable with to build a programmable DSL. A great tool, at least for Python, that exposes this is: https://github.com/cloudtools/troposphere https://github.com/cloudtools/troposphere. This gives me the full power of python, so I can build abstractions, use inheritance and encapsulation to specialize certain things. We've done a lot of work to automate our infrastructure provisioning, but I'm interested in the abstraction layer Terraform provides -- especially for multiple providers. How can we bridge the gap that is left by Terraform from having a fully complete programming language to define infrastructure (which has downsides but in my opinion, more upsides)?
  • mitchellh 12y ago
    Terraform fully supports JSON as an input format as a 1st class citizen: http://www.terraform.io/docs/configuration/syntax.html http://www.terraform.io/docs/configuration/syntax.html You can use that to write higher level wrappers to generate the JSON, and was indeed one of the intentions.
    • mahmoudimus 12y ago
      Sweet, thanks Mitchell. I'm always impressed at the level of polish your products have. I'll take this for a spin and I'll report back any results. Is there a mailing list or just #hashicorp on Freenode?
  • kolev 12y ago
    I've tried to use Troposphere, but found it a redundant layer on top of the Python dicts. I ended up building my own Macro language that compiles to raw CloudFormation JSON. What's funny is that I wanted to call this Macro language exactly Terraform. I'll definitely look into Terraform, it looks to have a lot of the features that I implement although most of mine were tailored exactly toward CFN and it may not be practical to switch. Maybe I'll finally convince my employer to open-source it.
• courtf 12y ago
  Just stumbled across this project with the same name, and at least some of the same goals: https://github.com/UrbanCode/terraform https://github.com/UrbanCode/terraform
  • sintaxi 12y ago
    Bummer, Terraform is also the engine that powers Harp & the Harp Platform. It doesn't appear this was very well researched before choosing a name. Confusion seem inevitable. https://github.com/sintaxi/terraform https://github.com/sintaxi/terraform https://github.com/sintaxi/harp https://github.com/sintaxi/harp Looks like an interesting project though.
  • spudfkc 12y ago
    That's owned by IBM http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4802:4qk0xm.2.5 http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4802:4qk...
• dkarapetyan 12y ago
  I use HashiCorp tools and I recommend them wherever I go. The reason I do that is because the tools are built with very specific use cases and are grounded in actual practices and backed by solid theory. None of their tools are something that was hacked up over the weekend. Looking forward to Terraform taking over the provisioning/deployment landscape.
• joeyspn 12y ago
  I can't keep their pace! Another amazing tool from Mitchell and his crew. Hashicorp well on its way to become a DevOps juggernaut...
• akoumjian 12y ago
  Salt Cloud provides most of these features. If this kind of thing interests you, you should check it out: http://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/topics/cloud/ http://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/topics/cloud/
  • sciurus 12y ago
    Does it really provide most of the features? All I can find in it's documentation is using salt to creating and destroying instances and volumes on various cloud providers. That just scratches the surface of what Terraform does.
    • akoumjian 12y ago
      Yes, it really does. Saltstack (with Salt Cloud) does cloud orchestration, configuration management, provisioning, works with containers, works with cloud providers
      • sciurus 12y ago
        Provisioning and configuration management seem out of scope for Terraform, it calls other tools to perform them. What I was wondering is if Saltstack's infrastructure management capabilities were comparable to Terraform's.
• ogig 12y ago
  Offtopic but i guess you, hashicorp guys, would like to know; there is a typo on the geometric animation. It says "Build, Combine, and Launch Infrastucture_", should be Infrastructure.
• mihok 12y ago
  This is pretty awesome. My question is how well does this integrate with and already setup infrastructure? Or would I have to recreate the system to get going with Terraform?
  • deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  • mitchellh 12y ago
    This is a really important question and I'm glad you brought it up. We're actively working on a way to bring existing infrastructure under Terraform management without having to recreate it from scratch. The process will actually be really easy (but is vaporware at the moment): Terraform only needs the TYPE of a resource and ID of that resource. From there, it can "refresh" the rest of the metadata in. Our idea is that you'll be able to say "I have an `aws_instance`, it's ID is `i-1234567`, and it satisfies the 'foo' resource" and it'll attach it. Point being: we're thinking about this, and it is an important aspect of Terraform. Another point is that you don't need to convert 100% of your infrastructure to Terraform to extract value from it. You can start by putting only specific services under management, and grow from there.
    • mihok 12y ago
      Unreal, I am really stoked to start playing around with this!! Thanks Mitchell & Hashicorp team!
    • kesor 12y ago
      This could maybe be similar to devstructure's blueprint, just for infrastructure.
    • wernerb 12y ago
      Hi, I think declarative resource management like this is the definitive future (or present as of now). I was wondering what happens when you increase the amount of nodes of a particular instance? I assume a new machine is started. But what happens if you remove the entire resource altogether, does it terminate the whole cluster? Similarly how does a scaling in a node work? And how would it affect dependencies? How does this consolidate with elasticity of a particular cluster. I.e. if an amazon load balancing group destroys an instance or takes one up, do I simply refresh and it would detect that this new instance is part of the defined cluster in terraform? Awesome work on this tool.
• jimmcslim 12y ago
  Is there a way to encrypt variables and provide a password to decrypt when executing a plan, so that I can commit my API keys, passwords, etc to source control without fear? I'm thinking something similar to Ansible and its 'vault' concept for variables (sure Chef, Puppet, etc have something similar).
  • mitchellh 12y ago
    There isn't at the moment, but it is definitely something we need to think through. We didn't want to ship anything broken though (illusion of security), so we deferred this feature until we can think it through more carefully.
    • geerlingguy 12y ago
      One implementation you might want to take a look at/learn from is Ansible's Vault: http://docs.ansible.com/playbooks_vault.html http://docs.ansible.com/playbooks_vault.html
    • peterwwillis 12y ago
      I'd suggest looking into OpenPGP and see if one of its apps won't work for you (they implement ssh-agent protocol support, and have a couple other apps for doing on-demand crypto)
• jscott0918 12y ago
  What is the licensing on the source code?
  • iamtew 12y ago
    It's under Mozilla Public License, version 2.0. https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/blob/master/LICENSE https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/blob/master/LICENSE
• _random_ 12y ago
  "Terraform" - seriously? Making world a better place through constructing elegant hierarchies for maximum code reuse and extensibility?
• lkrubner 12y ago
  Off-topic: it is interesting to me how different companies seem to dominate a space for a few years, and then recede. It's a common pattern. I can remember in 2009 when it seemed like RightScale www.rightscale.com was the dominant force creating tools to take advantage of AWS, but nowadays I never hear of them, never see anything interesting come from them. All the interesting stuff is happening elsewhere.
  • kbenson 12y ago
    I think it's easy for dominant players to sit back and let revenue stream in when there's no much in the way of real competition, which can lead to devs leaving for greener pastures (where green is either more interesting or pays better because dev is de-prioritized at the current company). Then some real competition shows up and the company is woefully unprepared. I think it's an important lesson, just because your competition doesn't appear to be forcing you to innovate and expand, doesn't mean there isn't someone silently lurking ready to upend your world.
• devcamcar 12y ago
  How would you compare Terraform to something like Razor? I think it might be a good one to add to your "vs Other Software" section: http://puppetlabs.com/solutions/next-generation-provisioning http://puppetlabs.com/solutions/next-generation-provisioning
  • errordeveloper 12y ago
    Razor is for private cloud, the biggest problems it solves are bare-metal provisioning as well as OS-specific mass-install tools. One of use-case for Razor: pop-in a new server into the rack, get provision ESXi with Razor and then provision a number of CentOS and Debian VMs without having to care how different is Kickstart from Preseed. It's a great too, but it's mostly for private cloud and Teraform is for public cloud and is therefore at a higher level.
• rsync 12y ago
  I cannot wait to dive into this. We (rsync.net) will absolutely make our storage a usable component in terraform.
• lukebond 12y ago
  Anyone know if an API is planned? If I want to manage infrastructure from code I would love Terraform to be an option. As a (predominantly) Node.js developer, I'd probably use pkgcloud for this sort of thing. Terraform supports a great range of providers and has some more advanced features, so I'd love to play with it as an alternative to pkgcloud.
  • flylib 12y ago
    +1
• cdnsteve 12y ago
  Considering Packer is written in Go, can you shed some light on this platform, what languages did you decide to use?
  • geku 12y ago
    According to their Github repo it's written in Go: https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform
• errordeveloper 12y ago
  On the page about integration with Consul [1], I read "Terraform can update the application's configuration directly by setting the ELB address into Consul." The questiomn is whether I can do somewhat other way around, i.e. set get information from Consul and point ELB to it, somewhat like Synapse or SmartStack... Or may be I don't need service discovery tool for this yet and can just use TF without Consul, simply configure the components of the infrastracture and the ELB? The point is just to simplify the first step and avoid adding logic to support Consul lookups in the apps... What's the easiest way here? [1]: http://www.terraform.io/intro/examples/consul.html http://www.terraform.io/intro/examples/consul.html
  • errordeveloper 12y ago
    Ok, I think I'll just try interacting with Consul via DNS, didn't know it's a thing!
• clarkdave 12y ago
  Thanks everyone at Hashicorp! This tool looks awesome. I wish it had been around years ago so I might have a nice version-controlled set of configuration files instead of a bunch of wiki articles and post-it notes ;) I have a quick question I didn't see covered in the docs. Is there a best practise way to organise Terraform configuration files? Specifically when using it to manage different environments (e.g. staging, prod, qa). I'm thinking of some sort of folder structure like this: / production/ web.tf staging/ web.tf qa/ web.tf test-servers.tf So, `terraform apply production` would then plan and apply changes for production servers, `terraform apply staging` the same for staging, etc. Would be interested to know if you have any thoughts on this, or if there's some sort of paradigm you folks are using internally.
  • mitchellh 12y ago
    We should've included a roadmap, but Terraform 0.2 will introduce first-class modules and a [basic] package manager. We'll also address environments then.
    • otterley 12y ago
      Can we please have a non-sucky package manager so I can finally tell developers to do the right thing instead of begging me for Docker?
      • icebraining 12y ago
        debs built with fpm[1] have been working for me. Unless you need something particularly complex, it should just be a matter of setting up a directory with the right layout and calling fpm with a couple of parameters. [1] https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm
      • ecnahc515 12y ago
        I'm pretty sure by package manager, he means to install Terraform modules. Docker still fits for your problem, so does Packer. Honestly, it's super nice to not have to worry about any external resources failing, where you only have 1 thing pulled in to deploy any type of application, and that would be the image.
• peterwwillis 12y ago
  tl;dr: Terraform is modular virtual infrastructure automation. [I would say it's an orchestration tool, but that usually implies datacenter-wide resources, and this just seems to apply to cloud service providers] "[..] Terraform combines resources from multiple services providers: we created a DigitalOcean Droplet and then used the IP address of that droplet to add a DNS record to DNSimple. This sort of infrastructure composition from code is new and extremely powerful." Well, "new" in the sense of "we created another thing to automate infrastructure deployment and configuration". I have worked with various amalgamated solutions that do this for the past 12 years. Of course they mention that in the software comparison section, but it doesn't take away from the fact that this isn't new by a long shot. "Terraform has a feature that is critical for safely iterating infrastructure: execution plans. Execution plans show you what changes Terraform plans on making to your infrastructure. [..] As a result, you know exactly what Terraform will do to your infrastructure to reach your desired state, and you can feel confident that Terraform won't surprise you in unexpected ways." So it's declarative, and it has a dry-run mode. The thing that really bugs me is the idea that you should be creating "code" to do rote tasks such as changing resources or deploying things. You know what the single most problematic thing about infrastructure changes is? Human error. It's a simple fact of user interface design that humans are less likely to fuck up a point-and-click interface than a command line program that you have to feed a hand-edited config to. And automated config generation can arguably be more error-prone. Automation/orchestration should not simply make things happen automatically. It should make things work more reliably, and require less expertise to do so. To be frank, any code monkey with a few weeks of free time to kill can create a tool that does exactly what this one does, and that's why there are dozens of them that all do the same thing, yet we always need a new one.... because they all stink at actually making things work better. This comic isn't just funny, it's a truism: https://xkcd.com/1319/ https://xkcd.com/1319/
• bfish510 12y ago
  My one gripe is the font choice on your homepage. Makes it very annoying to read.
• mongrol 12y ago
  How does this compare to Ansible? It appears to be operate in the same space/level.
  • mpdehaan2 12y ago
    Ansible author here! Hi Mitchell and crew! Our users are great fans of Vagrant and Packer, so +1 for those. From a cursory overview, it looks like Terraform is basically LIKE a CloudFormation type abstraction. Ansible contains declarative models for lots of cloud providers as well, but does not attempt to abstract out the different clouds. We generally view wanting to show things in their natural state (figuring you will know you want to use feature X or Y, and want the knobs/buttons exposed). But yes, we have similar features for saying "X instances of this should be running now", make it so, all that don't require use of CloudFormation. For people that like Terraforms flavor though, I can see users using these tools together. They could declare a cloud using either ansible or terraform, and then use ansible for the final configuration and application deployment, plus full lifecycle management. I know things like Packer like to walk people down a more imagey road, but you can also use config tools to describe the recipes that build your images, and that would include Ansible, Puppet, Chef, or even (if you so wished) bash. I'm not a fan of bash though :) I'm happy to see more efforts to make cloud provisioning accessible though, and like the idea that this would allow more easy migration between some cloud providers. Ansible has a lot of the same declarative thingies, but will probably appeal more to people who aren't looking for the DSL. http://docs.ansible.com/list_of_cloud_modules.html http://docs.ansible.com/list_of_cloud_modules.html It doesn't look like Terraform is attempting to be a provisioner itself, so it wouldn't do the things that Ansible or other config/app deploy tools do once you have a running instance, but does some of the things various config tools do to help you GET a running instance. One of the things shown in the Ansible examples are how to do a cloud deploy in one hop, i.e. request resources and also configure the stack all the way to the end, from one button press, and can also be used to orchestrate the rolling updates of those machines, working with the cloud load balancers and so on, throughout their entire life cycle -- all using just the one tool. As for where the future of this tool is, I obviously can't speculate, nor should I. But I do welcome more attempts to simplify beasts like the AWS EC2 API space, because I think we both agree nobody wants to really keep all of that in their head at all times.
• eudoxus 12y ago
  Does Terraform have any service failure related features, ie if an instances fails?
• cel1ne 12y ago
  Computer science – Better living through ever higher stacks of abstraction!
• mike-cardwell 12y ago
  How does it handle failures? I.e in the first example it creates a server and then creates a dns record. What if the dns record creation fails? Does it roll back everything (i.e destroy the server)? I'd probably want a system that automatically retried x times before rolling back for some situations. In other situations I'd probably want it to not roll back or only roll back some of the tasks. How flexible is it?
  • pearkes 12y ago
    Terraform saves partial state as it creates resources for these exact scenarios. In your example, Terraform would create and save the ID of the server to state before going along to create the DNS record. If the DNS record failed to create for some external reason, the next `terraform apply` you ran would simply refresh the server and go on to create the DNS record.
• cetra3 12y ago
  Would this be a good fit or are there any plans to include providers for hypervisors (VMWare, Virtualbox, Xen etc.. ) Or even containers (i.e, Docker)?
• arasmussen 12y ago
  Based solely on the name and the logo, I was really hoping this was going to be an awesome game :P
• jscheel 12y ago
  This would be great for us. Various parts of our stack are spread around so many different platforms, and this could really take the grunt work out of that. Not to mention removing the need of dealing with fifteen various shoddy interfaces. Heck, AWS isn't even consistent with itself (just check out OpsWorks vs Route53).