alt Hacker News> The Terraform ecosystem has spent a decade working around a fundamental architectural mismatch: we're using filesystem semantics to solve a distributed systems problem. The result is predictable and painful.
You portray this as a design flaw, but it's just the Hashicorp marketing funnel towards hosted Terraform, which solves the arbitration problems that you encounter at scale while allowing Hashicorp to give the cli tooling away for free.
Terraform Cloud does not actually solve this. It moves the state into their service and manages locking centrally, but the underlying model is unchanged. It is still one file with a global lock. That is why refresh bottlenecks and contention show up there too. What we are pointing at is the model itself, not just where the file is hosted. We know this space well from building Terrateam, which competes with Terraform Cloud on orchestration.