You Have to Feel It

But I feel depressed every time I use Terraform. I see why it is useful, good etc. But I just enjoy it least of all the programming activities.

Pulumi isn't much better. I feel IaC done that way isn't the way we will settle on long term.

To connect the dots, Mitchell is the creator of terraform. And honestly, I kind of feel the same. I think it points out that even if you "feel" it as the creator, that doesn't mean others will feel the same way, necessarily.

Does my side project provide any hope?

https://peace.mk/blog/checkpoint/

(old blog post, but I'm slow in making progress)

They left the role of CTO many years ago, then became an IC again, and then left, safe to assume he wasn’t feeling it either.

Not a popular opinion I know, but I really like writing Terraform in HCL2. Like, if I’d invented this, it’d give me the feels and I’d want to share it.

Please try some Cloudformation then reflect and reevaluate.

I get the feeing you're looking at this through the specific lens of a programmer. Terraform isn't made for programmers - you'll miss all the flexibility a real language gives you. It's made for ops people who deal with wrangling a whole bunch of different types of systems with different API's and languages and just need some way to standardize the management of disparate systems, whatever counts as "infrastructure".

The state file thing gets a relatively large part of the hate but it's that and the limitations of the DSL that make the DAG possible and useful. Pulumi and all the other wrappers don't solve this, though they can plausibly solve the "closer to programming" problem and I'm sure that has a valid audience.

I guess what I'm saying is, I think it'll stick around and we will in fact settle on it for a large part of operational work. I'll add that I also think k8s should die a quiet death and _that_ will be seen in retrospect as a necessary step to something better.

I quit a $400k+ job to get away from IaC. I loath yaml. More and more, my day was filled with "you have an error on line 1, good luck." It was more k8s than tf, but I get the same sneer on my face when messing with tf.

I refuse to let such a shitty experience be what defines my day.

I was hoping pulumi would help. Haven't used it yet, but it is sad to hear it doesn't live up to the hype.

FWIW: https://x.com/mitchellh/status/1938066378185183279

With Terraform I have felt I'm fighting it at times but I also understand the reasons.

When you eventually understand the constraints and learn to work with it. A zen moment :D

Is there anybody who enjoys any form of configuration management? It feels like the most joyless of all technical activities, like filling a tax form.