el-duderino42
Terraform can’t replace it well. Maybe facilitate the transition to more cloud native setups where you don’t need Ansible at all. But only within limits. If you’re asked to implement something there’s no cloud offering for, and it’s slightly more complex, you’re back to ansible.
CDKTF is totally optional and besides the point. Could as well say you can use Pulumi with Makefiles so the Pulumi choice doesn’t make it simpler.
If however a dedicated devops team has to manage it eventually, and there are multiple dev teams who all use different languages, then Terraform is better, since it’s practically impossible to learn all these languages. Terraform will give you a dumbed down enough lingua franca.
Also Terraform gives you the advantage to keep code complexity to a minimum. No chance to find some “clever” self referencing function or other language specific crazy stuff to solve a problem in it, it forces you to keep it simple.
So I’m sceptical whether this approach of spending ages on this really is that productive, cost-benefit-wise. Usually it doesn’t stop there, but this optimization becomes obsessive and conpulsive too often. Especially if they then also feel like they need to advertise for it in blog posts. Just the fact that the author thinks a mouse clutters up his desk seems to me like such a first world problem and a sign of lack of resilliency for real life. And before you know it your entire diet consists of vanilla ice cream, you pee in milk bottles that you collect, and you run strings through your house to erect borders for germ-free zones.
Besides it decreases compatibility and flexibility. “Oh, I need to do some Magic SysRQ shortcut. Oh, my keyboard doesn’t have the SysRQ key!” … “Oh, I need to ssh to a box to fix something. Oh, I’m so used to my heavily optimized nvim that I can’t operate the normal vi anymore!” … “Oh, I need to do some image manipulation. Oh, I have to spend 3 days learning and troubleshooting some GIMP keyboard shortcuts!” … “Oh, I need to connect to some completely out of date Java Applet based IPMI tool. Oh, to attach an iso image to it I need an obscure shortcut which I can’t do with my keyboard!”
I mean if none of these things ever happen, and one’s computer life is in such a narrow bubble that one can survive an entire year without it, then good for them, but I think for 99% of IT professionals it is either not worth it or impossible, and therefore irrelevant.