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Comment by c3534l | Hacker News Reader

If its not specified to be there, it shouldn't be there.

The way Terraform works makes that not feasible. As it is, you can introduce Terraform incrementally to your infra, and it won’t wipe away anything it’s not aware of. If you delete everything not explicitly specified, Terraform would have to describe literally everything, which could be a gigantic barrier to entry.

We know that if state is not used we can't handle deletions without affecting everything else.

So here's a solution that could satisfy stateless proponents: we don't keep state for anything that we deploy and instead we should store state for everything else so we will know what not to remove /s

But seriously, as things are right now, state is necessary, it could be possible to get rid of it, but that would require cloud providers to designate their infrastructure that way.

And if they do that, in practice (because components building the cloud service likely are stateful) we would end up with a system with declarative language which in reality just abstracts away the state from us. Kind of what AWS CloudFormation essentially is.

This doesn't work unless your infrastructure is entirely static. As soon as you have active control loops like e.g. an autoscaler it will create resources that you don't know about and would then delete.

That sounds logical, but it's not very practical due to the cost of enumeration; plus, it requires providers to gain deep knowledge into things that are implied dependencies ... like "hrmmm, should I try to delete this service-linked role or do I actually need it?"

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