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Re:Terraform 0.12 by mirceal on Thursday May 23, 2019 @10:04AM (#19991882)
detecting resources that are already there may be useful in a limited set of scenarios (prototypes / retrofitting) but definitely should not be the way you build things. thinking through what your cloud infra is doing and expressing it is the way to go.

there is also a way to do this for cloudformation. look up cloudformer.

Re:Terraform 0.12 by ReidZB on Thursday May 23, 2019 @11:06AM (#19992420)
I agree, importing resources is a limited use-case. However... it's one I find myself in more often than I would like. Reality is often disappointing. At least, with the companies I've work(ed) with.

That said, I don't think CloudFormer does the same thing. I haven't used it before, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but to me it looks like it takes existing resources and generates a CloudFormation template out of them. But then you're still expected to upload that template and create a new stack, with all brand-new CloudFormation managed resources—is that right?

So for example, CloudFormer for an RDS instance would probably be a no-go.

In the Terraform case, after you've imported resources, there's no need to re-create them. There's the question of if what's in the template will match what the resources actually are, but there are also tools to generate Terraform templates straight off resources.