I don't know if anyone here remembers the Ant build system, but writing your own Terraform spaghetti strongly resembles the days of Ant, before Maven came along. Teams over-engineering their build pipeline, building "platforms" that other teams must use, an unmaintainable and untestable mess. Time better spent elsewhere.
I have to disagree a little here, if you're already in AWS, then an investment in fixing your terraform structure is not just worth the money, but gives you a better understanding of the infrastructure architecture, you also retain ownership of your deployments. What happens if Flightcontrol go down for whatever reason? Or are sold off like other's we've seen, or god forbid you need some fine tuning that isn't in the Flightcontrol's website. You're now depending on, and maybe even paying for, an external company for devops support to do something you already know how to do.
It seems to be in the long term, that time is definitely not better spent elsewhere.
These are all valid points. This is a fundamental issue with relying on non-open 3rd party solutions and (leaky) abstractions. The best solution here would be some standard that the hyperscalers implement themselves, but this is of course incredibly unlikely.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see that at some point if these tools catch on.
AWS in particular has a pattern of bringing toys everyone loves in house and making managed services out of them.
I'm kind of amazed that they haven't already. It would be such a good selling point for Azure, or GCP, etc. "We have a UI like Heroku or Vercel. Compare that to our confusing competitors!"
This hits home so much!
I remember last year when I asked our Cloud Ops to add an additional EC2 instance and adjust sizes on two others. It took twelve work hours and resulted in +3k -2k changed lines "because they had no way of doing it now without merging seven hundred other changes.
They could get customers initially by promising a simple start to get "on the cloud", but would keep customers due to support, scaling, monitoring, ci/cd and maintenance. Cheap startups could use it as a one-time tool, but I think a lot would see the added value they bring.
1. All centrally managed. Engineers hand off repos and devops own the instantiation. Devop is a core team with an infra monorepo.
2. Devops capable engineers are embedded into teams, and each project owns its own infrastructure with golden path guidance.
The hybrid version, central management of most stuff with project specific devops burden, is the worst of both and causes no end of problems.