Show HN: Terragen.sh – proof of concept Terraform boilerplate generator
terragen.sh
terragen.sh
It's an extremely narrow use-case right now as I put it together in about 4 hours, but it has a fully functioning extensible backend that uses versioned Go templates to store and render the terraform. Right now, the site generates terraform for the hello-world app for AWS AppRunner.
In an effort to get early feedback, I decided to post the link even though the website is still extremely limited.
Do you think there's a use case for a website like this? Maybe advanced configurations require payment to generate? Would you ever use a tool like this? Maybe if it also created best practices VPCs, database configurations, etc?
But also, maybe there isn't much of a market for anything more advanced!
Thanks for any and all feedback!
We strongly believe that some kind of a layer above present-day IaC is missing and badly needed. What exactly is the right solution isn't 100% clear just yet; but it is along the lines of a generator / framework / compiler / "OS" that would provide reasonable defaults without taking away flexibility. Then there's also a challenge of one-off usage; generator alone is only useful once; a framework on the other hand is helpful all the way throughout the project's lifecycle.
Terraform looks like the best (only?) "underlying" IaC, more like a target "assembly language" using the LLVM parallel. The crux seems to be the runtime - it is less about any given state of infrastructure (that's already captured pretty well with existing IaC tools) and way more about the logic of transitions between those states.
Managing state / running it on the server (the "CI for infrastructure" use case eg TF Cloud / Spacelift / Env0 etc) seems to be the logical extension of the baseline case of initial provisioning. We started with this, but now are viewing it as secondary consideration that will fall into place once the baseline framework scenario is figured.