Terraform v1.0 Is Out | Hacker News Reader

Terraform v1.0 Is Out

terraform.io

54 pointsweeha11 comments

Bigger thread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27433863

I mean this as a constructive complaint, not just for this post, but many posts on HN: I do wish the titles of submissions included some context that would clue me into the nature of the product, service, or meaning of the submission. I do not fault the submitter.

I know that this desire conflicts with the submission guideline to avoid modification of the original title unless misleading. I understand that this technique can sometimes foster curiosity, and cause users to follow links and learn about new things. Still, I often read submissions and even websites that assume a level of familiarity that act as a barrier to followup simply because I miss a useful connection.

I also recognize that this may be perceived as mere laziness on my part, and you're right, it is. Suggested title:

Terraform v1.0 Release: Allows users to declaratively describe infrastructure configuration on multiple public clouds.

Alternatively, a submission content tagging scheme could work, but that introduces other challenges. [ ML content tagging system, anyone? ]

This would significantly degrade the HN experience for me for two reasons. Firstly it would make submission titles much longer and therefore make the hn page less compact. Secondly it would open the door to editorializing in the submission title, which is generally undesireable.

In this specific instance, terraform is not exactly an obscure piece of tech. Do you really think your suggested title is an improvement?

I also prefer shorter titles.

Do you consider my suggested title editorializing? If so, how?

Also, with respect to your comment "Terraform is not exactly obscure tech": you're right. Google estimates there are "About 14,200,000 results". My desire for context is not only to address obscurity, but also disambiguation. Perhaps Terraform is not the best example. That said, without checking, did you know what FizzyGum is? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27421401 Kindly note the top comment and responses.

I'm not saying your title was, just that people posting titles would often struggle to keep them neutral. This would be especially the case in topics that tend to be hot-button areas for HN such as privacy, anything to do with US politics, free speech vs platform moderation etc.

I don't see any issue with the title. This is hacker _news_. The news here is that a new release is out. For those that don't use Terraform, your suggested title could be interpreted that declaratively describing infrastructure on multi-cloud is a new v1.0 feature. And those that do use Terraform of course don't need the intro.

I recommend breaking out your terraform code into separate folders and calling them "components". Write a wrapper around the terraform script to pass in -var-file which uses an argument called ENVIRONMENT that you pass to the wrapper. I think the built in support for modules is less useful for what you actually want to do because you end up with variables spread between variables.tf, outputs.tf files.

I use a tool I wrote to layer my infrastructure with layers called components and I configure it with a Graphviz file.

My tool, called mazzle (previously devops-pipeline) would run parts of the graph that can run in parallel in parallel. It can also run parts of the build on SSH workers. You bring up the workers at the beginning of the build.

Here's an example of a graph generated from graphviz file: https://github.com/samsquire/mazzle/blob/master/docs/archite...

This graph brings up a hashicorp vault server, Java application, bastion proxy etc.

here's the graphviz file: https://github.com/samsquire/mazzle-starter/blob/master/arch...

It describes the ordering of the infrastructure, the invocation of Ansible, packer, shell scripts to set up vault etc.

The idea is to be able to bring up a new environment by changing one parameter. There's a React GUI too.

https://devops-pipeline.com

dupe: https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/releases/tag/v1.0.0

(other post has more comments)

I rather suspect you meant to link the other HN thread and not the repo release tag :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27433863

lol yes. facepalm

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