Terraform (and kubernetes) itself aren't a lowest common denominator, however I believe the comment alludes to an approach where you try to abstract cloud features. This can (kind of) reasonably be done with terraform and kubernetes and avoiding vendor specific services such as various ML services, DynamoDB, etc.
However, you can use terraform just fine while still leveraging vendor specific services that actually offer added value, like DynamoDB or Lambda. Cloudformation however doesn't really offer that much added value (if any) over terraform, so using terraform isn't an LCD approach perse.
Yes — that's basically what I was thinking: you could make an argument that using Kubernetes inherently adds an abstraction layer which might not be preferable to using platform-native components but it sounded like the person I was responding to was making the argument that using Terraform requires that approach.
I found that especially puzzling because one of the reasons why we switched to Terraform was because it let us take advantage of new AWS features on average much faster than CloudFormation.
Re:Terraform vs. AWS CloudFormation
by jamesfinlayson on Wednesday October 06, 2021 @09:18PM
(#28780606)
I once got really stuck with CloudFormation not deleting a resource that also didn't show up in the AWS console - not fun.
The problem is when those help tickets get responses like “try deleting everything by hand and see if it recreates without an error next time”. They've worked on CloudFormation over the last year or but everyone I've known who's switched to tools like Terraform did so after getting tired of unpredictable deployment times or hitting the many cases where CloudFormation gets itself into an irrecoverable state. I can count on no fingers the number of development teams who used CF and didn't ask for help recovering from an error state in CF which required out-of-band remediation.
I believe they've also gotten better at tracking new AWS features but there were multiple cases where using Terraform got you the ability to use a feature 6+ months ahead of CF.
> A portable Terraform + Kubernetes contraption is a lowest common denominator approach.
Terraform is much, much richer than CloudFormation so I'd compare it to CDK (with the usual aesthetic debate over declarative vs. procedural models) and it doesn't really make sense to call it LCD in the same way that you might use that to describe Kubernetes because it's not trying to build an abstraction which covers up the underlying platform details. Most of the Terraform I've written controls AWS but there's a significant value to also being able to use the same tool to control GCP, GitLab, Cloudflare, Docker, various enterprise tools, etc. with full access to native functionality.