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The future of Terraform CDK

https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform-cdk
33•mfornasa•1h ago

Comments

vbernat•1h ago
It's odd to always say "Hashicorp, an IBM company". Looks like they want to assign blame.

I did try Pulumi a while back, but the compatibility with Terraform modules was not great, so I've switched to CDKTF, which can handle unmodified modules. Dunno if I'll switch back to Pulumi or just use OpenTofu directly.

smithcoin•57m ago
We use OpenTofu it’s pretty seamless
benatkin•32m ago
Now more will be using a combination of OpenTofu and Terraform, and there will probably be some tacit endorsement of OpenTofu by Hashicorp folks in their communication with those who are using both. Good to see!
Hamuko•19m ago
Does it do ephemeral values yet?
cube2222•11m ago
Yep, as of yesterday’s 1.11 release it’s supported!

That release also includes a new “enabled” meta argument, so you don’t have to hack around conditional resources with count = 0.

[0]: https://opentofu.org/blog/opentofu-1-11-0/

Disclaimer: affiliated with the project

atonse•56m ago
I was thinking the same thing about the "an IBM company". My guess is that it's a lazy find/replace.
jjice•55m ago
> It's odd to always say "Hashicorp, an IBM company". Looks like they want to assign blame.

All their branding does this now, including the HashiCorp logo on their website [0]. There's gotta be a name for this specific branding pattern, but I don't know it.

[0] https://www.hashicorp.com/en/blog/products/terraform

firesteelrain•14m ago
It’s how Red Hat identifies themselves too
GardenLetter27•54m ago
Damn, what are the best alternatives here? For pure AWS I guess CDK directly is okay, but locks you in.
scruff3y•53m ago
Just use Terraform?
cholantesh•18m ago
Yeah I'm struggling to see the value here.
stackskipton•6m ago
The value for TFCDK was Developers don't have to learn another language, they can just continue to use existing language they already know.

Downsides are doing infrastructure in a programming language was always problematic unless developer was skilled at Ops which most who used TFCDK were not.

sshine•52m ago
Terranix? ;-)
madjam002•11m ago
Not gonna lie Terranix has been working great for us, all our configuration is in Nix files anyway so it's so easy to just pass stuff in rather than using Tf variables etc
lillecarl•6m ago
Yes, the NixOS module system is so much more composable than the TF one
mfornasa•50m ago
Probably Pulumi
srmatto•48m ago
If you want maximal complexity use Crossplane. :P
tapoxi•42m ago
I went with CDK, I'm locked into AWS already and it means my major dependency for IaC is my cloud vendor and not a third party.

If I really need to migrate off of AWS at some point I'll throw an LLM at it.

ryandvm•11m ago
Exactly. It's just so much cleaner to do it in the Cloud provider's native tooling. The impedance mismatch from Cloud-agnostic abstractions always just makes thing shitty enough that in the long run you spend more time dealing with weird edge cases.

Besides, actual full-scale Cloud migrations are exceedingly rare.

zer0-c00l•54m ago
This is a bummer. I don't particularly like Pulumi but use it anyways because for my use cases being able to write actual code is really impactful. Sucks to see fewer options in that space
leetrout•38m ago
The often excluded option is dynamically generating JSON and feeding that to TF instead of HCL.

You can combine it with tools like Dhall or my personal preference Jsonnet instead of imperative languages for an interesting experience for reusable pieces outside of module concepts.

yearolinuxdsktp•47m ago
That’s a real shame. It seems like Pulumi is the only alternative for internal DSLs for IaaC? I always found HCL to be quite terrible, slowly becoming less painful, but not really refactoring-friendly.

Terraform CDK had promise as a blessed infrastructure-as-actual-code solution from the official maintainer of Terraform, so easier to sell internally rather than something from a new vendor like Pulumi. I feel sorry for those teams who have migrated to TF CDK.

Internal vs external DSLs explained in the middle of this page: https://martinfowler.com/bliki/DslQandA.html

chuckadams•23m ago
Kubernetes has a few things, including cdk8s. Yoke looks promising too.
mfornasa•32m ago
Rug pulls on infrastructure components seem even worse than other rug pulls as they can hit your entire infra codebase at once
lillecarl•7m ago
This is why infrastructure people are conservative by nature, it's so damn much gruntwork to migrate without downtime
deadfece•27m ago
At least they gave us some notice, that’s much appreciated.
dev_l1x_be•27m ago
It would be great to have an alternative to Terraform that uses a bit more advanced provider (at last for AWS). Does OpenTofu use that same provider?
lijok•10m ago
It does. What are you looking for in a more advanced AWS provider?
NeckBeardPrince•22m ago
Hashicorp, an IBM company
tonnydourado•4m ago
Hashicorp,an IBM company
lloydatkinson•13m ago
What was the point of it? Terraform supports AWS anyway.
crimsonnoodle58•12m ago
This is particularly frustrating as I've spent the last year writing many thousands of lines of CDKTF Python.

HCL just does not have the modularity and expressiveness that Python, or other languages CDKTF supports.

I guess I'll spend another year migrating to Pulumi now..

lijok•8m ago
The lack of expressiveness of HCL is the point and what makes it so good
lijok•7m ago
Good move. They clearly didn't have the resources they needed. The design of the CDKs was atrocious.

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