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Comment by kraig | Hacker News Reader

IMO they should have dumped HCL once they caught a whiff of what Pulumi is up to, much rather go with actual languages that when you learn them, you pick up some valued knowledge. You can also do a whole lot more with Typescript than you can with HCL 2.

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+1 on Pulumi.

It's a bit disconcerting when one of the BIG aspects of the Terraform 0.12 release is some support for preliminary types.

Pulumi just uses Typescript.

I'm not entirely sure why Terraform is going in the direction of reinventing the wheel when it can leverage stuff out there.

Agreed, the data model of Terraform simply doesn’t match the problem domain. You need an algorithm to codify the pattern and then data to fill in the params. Terraform doesn’t allow you to create the patterns you need in a way that’s debugable and doesn’t allow for code reuse. For simple setups it’s not apparent there’s a problem but when they get more complex it’s nearly impossible to use.

Additionally you have to rewrite everything for each cloud provider, so it just expands the work required, all with no real IDE integration. I’d just write against the cloud provider APIs directly or look at Pulumi when they get interactive debugging.

I used terraform with my AWS deployments because there were lots of examples and I pretty much was able to find a solution that matched my problem and copy paste.

Then, I needed to launch infra in GCP and I messed around with terraform unsuccessfully for a few days before writing about 10 lines of gcloud CLI commands into a makefile.

Now I just check a makefile into my project and just break things up into little shell scripts.

Solved so many problems and headaches.

I'm so tempted to do abandon CloudFormation for a Makefile with AWS cli commands.

If there wasn't a chip on my shoulder telling me I had to use what the next person would expect else as a contractor I risk being seen as unprofessional I'd do it in a heartbeat.

I've never used Terraform but CloudFormation just seems to suck, the documentation is poor and relatively few people are sharing their stack files. I've lost count of the number of times I've hit an error only to find Google hasn't heard of it.

IMO both of you guys should take a look at Pulumi. You could still use a makefile but using their TS clients to access the APIs is much more intuitive and easier to diagnose than shell scripts.

I can't see paying an ongoing monthly fee unless I was dealing with really big and ever changing architecture. Most of the time, I am writing everything into a log because I will want the ability to rebuild everything in the event something goes down.

I wouldn’t say it becomes impossible to use at scale, what happens at scale with terraform, but rather the opinionated nature of HCL makes itself present in ways you probably won’t ever have to deal with if you’re shepherding very small fleets or single serving resources.

Personally I’m excited that loop operations now exist in 0.12

But thanks for the reference to Pulumi, had not heard of this and it looks very interesting.

The Terraform language extension in VSCode is very good.

It's not good, it doesn't understand the TF types and recommends values that are invalid for the context, there's no inline help (you have to go look it up on the website), refactoring a variable name doesn't fully work, and you can't set breakpoints or trace through the execution to determine what's going on... I mean it's practically in the mid-80s, although most of those things worked even back then.

The lesson here is that if you plan on making a language, even a DSL, you want to be sure you're really up for it since it's a lot of work.

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