Creating my personal cloud with HashiCorp

Re:Creating my personal cloud with HashiCorp by throwaway894345 on Saturday October 30, 2021 @10:11AM (#29048911)

I strongly suspect that these CDKs are not very well designed. In particular, what I want is something that lets me generate YAML/etc in a type-safe fashion. That YAML is then the input for an engine which reconciles the desired state with the actual state (a la Terraform or cloudFormation). The idea is that the “real programming language” layer just allows us to DRY our YAML. For a use case like this, we don’t need inheritance or methods, but just structs, maps, arrays, and functions; however, these CDKs typically index pretty hard on inheritance and generally make things more complicated than necessary.

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Re:Creating my personal cloud with HashiCorp by hnlmorg on Saturday October 30, 2021 @06:25PM (#29052763)

It's important to note that Terraform doesn't compile down to CloudFormation stacks like CDK does. Terraform providers instead call AWS APIs directly. This should allow Terraform much more composability than CDK for the very points you've listed unfortunately Terraform does still compile down to a fucking JSON state -- which is easily my biggest complaint about Terraform.

My issue with anything that ultimately compiles to a JSON or YAML state/config is that you lose the dependency tree (or your dependency tree becomes rigidly defined by the way the transpiler converts your code into JSON). It causes so many problems on any large project that ultimately the only solution is to break the project up into smaller distinct projects within the same git repository. Which is basically the same solution to working with JSON/YAML CF stacks directly.

If someone can create a language (or SDK for $PROGRAMMING_LANG) that then worked with AWS APIs directly, (like Terraform), didn't just transpile back to JSON, and isn't as verbose as using boto3 directly -- well I think that product might stand a real chance of displacing Terraform.

I've got a lot of strong thoughts on how this could be done right so I did consider having an attempt at it myself using the shell scripting language I'd designed as a rough foundation. But having a full time job already, two young kids, and a growing in popularity open source project (namely my aforementioned $SHELL), I realised any Terraform competitor I did create would be doomed to either never being maintained, or the project would literally burn me out.

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Re:Creating my personal cloud with HashiCorp by throwaway894345 on Saturday October 30, 2021 @06:38PM (#29052848)

Neither system deals well with large projects, but my CF criticisms weren’t predicated on the project size. So at the end of the day, CF has all of the problems TF has and then some.

But I do think that it would be really interesting to build an IaC project, and you’re right that it probably would be doomed. :)

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Re:Creating my personal cloud with HashiCorp by AstroDogCatcher on Saturday October 30, 2021 @11:35AM (#29049593)

That is certainly my impression with CDK. An even bigger heartache is the fact that I am writing a Python "program", but then have to use a JS binary to execute the deployment. Having the CDK synth/deploy functionality exposed via actual execution of the Python script (or even a built-in capability of the regular AWS CLI) would make much more sense to me.

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Re:Creating my personal cloud with HashiCorp by toiletduck on Saturday October 30, 2021 @01:49PM (#29050791)

Your suspicions are incorrect - I'd suggest trying the AWS CDK as it solves exactly the problem you want it to solve in the sense of providing strong type safety.

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Re:Creating my personal cloud with HashiCorp by throwaway894345 on Saturday October 30, 2021 @02:15PM (#29051008)

My only experience is with the AWS CDK.

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