AsCode – Terraform Alternative Syntax

ascode.run

2 points·justin_oaks··3 comments

Back when I was using AWS CloudFormation, I found a need to use Troposphere [0] to do some logic that couldn't be done in CloudFormation itself. When I switched to Terraform most of those problems went away since there is even better ways to perform simple programming logic in it.

Maybe there are some use cases where you still need to perform logic outside of Terraform where AsCode could be useful to some people.

I've seen the Starlark configuration language used in other places, such as Telegraf [0], but I think this is an interesting use of it.

[0] https://troposphere.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html

[1] https://github.com/influxdata/telegraf/blob/master/plugins/p...

i wonder what advantages this has over using a language-based IaC solution like Pulumi[0]?

[0]: https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi

Good question.

At this point, I think there's a bigger community for Terraform than Pulumi, so sometimes it's helpful to stick with something that more people use even if an alternative is superior. I'd like to hear from Pulumi users to get their perspective on using Pulumi. (If you're part of the Pulumi community, please speak up to let us know that the community isn't THAT small.)

If you're already working with Terraform then I see AsCode as potentially useful. Since AsCode outputs Terraform's HCL, it could be useful for parts of a Terraform project using AsCode while others directly use HCL. Or it could be part of a migration from plan from Terraform to AsCode.

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