It’s Time to Retire Terraform

Terraform exists in many people’s hearts much like a friend or a loved one, or maybe even an enemy. Whether it’s your job to maintain the Terraform configuration for the entire organization or you get the pleasure of having to write some every so often, it’s always there, waiting to ruin your day. To those who enjoy it, you may have Stockholm Syndrome. To those who hate it, I feel your pain.

Now, I am not here to disparage infrastructure as code. I am saying there has to be a better way to do it. In fact, Terraform has done the industry a huge service by bringing IaC to the masses. It surely has the lion’s share of the market, but that’s like saying Van Halen made good music because they were so popular (sorry for the stray). Terraform has served its purpose, but it’s time to retire it. Here are the reasons why followed by an alternative approach you should consider.

Each Terraform configuration and module are uniquely structured and different from each other. One team might use symlinks and complex folder structures to create a way to manage the promotion of changes across environments (we will get to this next), and another team might choose to shove everything in one file. Variables, outputs, and versions have the option of being their own files, spread across files, or bundled all in the same file. There are some patterns and conventions, but they are more akin to light suggestions. Modules are a whole other beast with their own idiosyncrasies.

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