Hacker News Reader

Comment by impoppy | Hacker News Reader

Then I guess it's a question to the startup I'm working at - why in the world did they overcomplicate so much stuff when in fact we have constant number of environments, workers, load balancers? In fact, every engineer in the company is very much aware on how our system operates and (I believe) could easily imitate whatever Terraform does with simple scripts.

View on HN

Future-proofing, I assume. Better to have things in Terraform now than to have to move them all later as you grow the application. Moving things into Terraform can be quite hard, since you essentially need to figure out how to reproduce the entire infrastructure from scratch.

YAGNI.

You won't need it. But you'll probably want it, since at most start-ups complexity grows over time.

Sounds like lack of knowledge and experience to start glueing random stuff to make things over complicated.

Unless your startup is wildly successful, which everyone is incentivized into believing. What you described sounds less like a Terraform problem and more like a complex infra problem.

Your startup probably has better things for engineers to do than the job Terraform does in determining what state changes to make.

I mean, the engineers could probably convert source into machine into machine instructions, too, but I bet your company would rather leave that to a compiler so that they could work on product.

If you have the skills on hand then I think it's worth doing TF off the bat, otherwise it's probably better to wait until you have the requisite pain/motivation to learn. It's a pain in the ass to learn how to do TF _initially_ but not bad to do after you learn, and going forward you avoid a lot of "oh wtf just happened" moments during deployments/infrastructure changes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com