Investigate other IaC technologies for operations-engineering projects

[levgorbunov1]

Why do we prefer Terraform? Should we consider other IaC technologies, such as AWS CDK or Pulumi?

[vijaykannan21]

1. Terraform is multiple cloud provider and infrastructure platform allows users to manage resources from various Environment.
2. Terraform uses Declarative Syntax.
3. Terraform maintains State management Which keeps track of the current state of the infrastructure.
4. Terraform has a large and active community, we can get lot of documents and tutorials for reference purpose.

[levgorbunov1]

I am not very familiar with Pulumi but is it not cloud agnostic and does it not keep track of actual state? Not sure about the size of the community for the other technologies...

I acknowledge the fact that AWS CDK is obviously AWS specific.

[levgorbunov1]

Also what about Ansible, Chef and Puppet

[levgorbunov1]

AWS CDK has CloudFormation templates as well which may make things easier

[levgorbunov1]

What about OpenTofu, an open source fork of Terraform released in 2023? Perhaps worth exploring.

[vijaykannan21]

while AWS CDK can technically be used in a multicloud environment with careful consideration and custom development, it's not the most straightforward or well-supported option for managing resources across multiple cloud providers. Organizations with multicloud requirements may find better support and flexibility with other IaC tools, like Terraform.

[PepperMoJ]

Yes we should, we should SPIKE a set of technologies we believe have the most potential (Pulumi, AWS CDK, OpenTofu).

Won't be long before they start charging for Terraform anyway...

[levgorbunov1]

Exactly, I think Terraform already has some paid components and being locked into 1 technology, controlled by 1 business, is never a good idea.

[levgorbunov1]

That being said I am a Terraform fan

[PepperMoJ]

Yeah I like it enough, but then I have nothing to compare it to, and don't really have that much experience. I'm doing some extra bits and bobs in my free time so I'll hopefully have some more insight soon enough 👁️

[jasonBirchall]

It comes down, like many things, to the requirement. What are our intentions here? What trade-offs are we willing to accept?

In my opinion, Terraform is an acceptable tool to use right now. We don't have much to manage; it's fairly easy to read and write, has good documentation, and the team has experience using it. The only downside is the lack of validity in what you're writing. Okay, there are terratest and test blocks, but I never feel truly comfortable that what I'm writing isn't going to bork the rest of the system completely.

I'd been keen to try Pulumi, but only from an experimental point of view. It would need to tick all of Terraform's boxes and offer a robust testing framework.