Re:Thinking Beyond IaC
by elevation on Tuesday April 30, 2024 @06:37PM
(#40217278)
I found myself wanting something like IfC while using terraform for the first time. I wrote 40 sloc to deploy a web app in under an hour, then shut it down cleanly. Everything I did could be tracked in git -- great!
Now with a couple of tweaks I could deploy to another cloud, right? Well, actually, Terraform is a thin (stateful) wrapper around vendor APIs which may not have functional equivalents elsewhere. Even for a simple hello world app, I had to completely rewrite my states to account for how compute nodes are provisioned.
In other words, even when using terraform, I was forced to use two entirely different languages to describe what I actually wanted, which was a machine with X CPU and Y RAM and no more than Z ms of latency to my target audience for less than $A/mo.
Now with a couple of tweaks I could deploy to another cloud, right? Well, actually, Terraform is a thin (stateful) wrapper around vendor APIs which may not have functional equivalents elsewhere. Even for a simple hello world app, I had to completely rewrite my states to account for how compute nodes are provisioned.
In other words, even when using terraform, I was forced to use two entirely different languages to describe what I actually wanted, which was a machine with X CPU and Y RAM and no more than Z ms of latency to my target audience for less than $A/mo.