Hacker News Reader

Yeah, it was a common pattern especially in older TF repositories from before workspaces had better support.

It takes quite a bit of discipline (and balance; sometimes the effort to make it “right” is not well-spent) to not end up in a mess when your infrastructure starts to scale across regions and providers.

View on HN

I would say it is still a common pattern. I don't see how workspaces really improves anything. The fundamental problem with Terraform is it lacks if statements. There are solutions that involve dynamic blocks and for_each, but I don't think they completely solve the problem. I would say they don't have great readability.

I would love to hear a reasonable way to not snowflake that doesn't dive down the dynamic hole.

Overall I think this is all an argument for Pulumi over Terraform.

To get around the separate directories/copies someone established a pattern of doing a for each environment at the top of each tf file and then all variables are stored as a map of each env, which I find interesting.

The pattern exists in one repo with the other being all the duplicates, they’ve been in “it just works” for long enough that no one has changed them. Workspaces look pretty slick, I’ll have to check them out

Reply on news.ycombinator.com