Comment by mdaniel

There's a lot wrong with Terraform but I don't think you're being at all fair with your specific critisims here:

> 1. I need a goddamn CLI to run it (versus giving someone a URL they can load in their tenant and have running resources afterward)

CloudFormation is the only IaC that supports "running as a URL" and that's only because it's an AWS native solution. And CloudFormation is a hell of a lot more painful to write and slower to iterate on. So you're not any better off for using CF.

What usually happens with TF is you'd build a deploy pipeline. Thus you can test via the CLI then deploy via CI/CD. So you're not limited to just the CLI. But personally, I don't see the CLI as a limitation.

> the goddamn CLI mandates live cloud credentials, but then stright-up never uses them to check a goddamn thing it intends to do to my cloud control plane

All IaC requires live cloud credentials. It would be impossible for them to work without live credentials ;)

Terraform does do a lot of checking. I do agree there is a lot that the plan misses though. That's definitely frustrating. But it's a side effect of cloud vendors having arbitrary conditions that are hard to define and forever changing. You run into the same problem with any tool you'd use to provision. Heck, even manually deploying stuff from the web console sometimes takes a couple of tweaks to get right.

> 1. related to that, having a state file that believes it knows what exists in the world is just ludicrous and pain made manifest

This is a very strange complaint. Having a state file is the bare minimum any IaC NEEDS for it to be considered a viable option. If you don't like IaC tracking state then you're really little better off than managing resources manually.

> a tool that thinks nuking things is an appropriate fix ... whew.

This is grossly unfair. Terraform only destroys resources when:

1. you remove those resources from the source. Which is sensible because you're telling Terraform you no longer want those resources

2. when you make a change that AWS doesn't support doing on live resources. Thus the limitation isn't Terraform, it is AWS

In either scenario, the destroy is explicit in the plan and expected behaviour.

All Terraform does is build a DAG, compare it with the current state file and pass the changes down to the provider so it can translate to the correct sequence of interactions with the upstream API. Most of your criticism boils down to limitations of the cloud provider API and/or Terraform provider quality. It won't check for naming collision for instance, it assumes you know what you are doing.

Regarding HCL, I respect their decision to keep the language minimal, and for all it's worth you can go very, very far with the language expressions and using modules to abstract some logic, but I think it's a fair criticism for the language not to support custom functions and higher level abstractions.

Amen, and I would add to that list “no, just because you use terraform doesn’t mean you can simply switch between cloud providers”.