alt Hacker NewsNot an opinion on Pulumi specifically, but an opinion on using imperative programming languages for infrastructure configuration: don't do it. (This includes using things like CDKTF)
Infrastructure needs to be consistent, intuitive and reproducible. Imperative languages are too unconstrained. Particularly, they allow you to write code whose output is unpredictable (for example, it'd be easy to write code that creates a resources based on the current time of day...).
With infrastructure, you want predictability and reproducibility. You want to focus more on writing _what_ your infra should look like, less _how_ to get there.
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Thanks for saving me the trouble of writing exactly that. I want my IaC to be roughly as Turing complete as JSOJ. It’s sooo tempting to say “if only I could write this part with a for loop…” and down that path lies madness.
There are things I think Terraform could do to improve its declarative specs without violating the spirit. Yet, I still prefer it as-is to any imperative alternatives.
> Particularly, they allow you to write code whose output is unpredictable
Is that an easy mistake to make and a hard one to recover from, in your experience?
The way you have to bend over backwards in Terraform just to instantiate a thing multiple times based on some data really annoys me..
yes. IaC is a misnomer. IaC implementations should have a spec (some kind of document) as the source of truth; not code.
Couldn't disagree more.
I have written both TF and then CDKTF extensively (!), and I am absolutely never going back to raw TF. TF vs CDKTF isn't declarative vs imperative, it's "anemic untyped slow feedback mess" vs "strong typesystem, expressive builtins and LSP". You can build things in CDKTF that are humanly intractable in raw TF and it requires far less discipline, not more, to keep it from becoming an unmaintainable mess. Having a typechecker for your providers is a "cannot unsee" experience. As is being able to use for loops and defining functions.
That being said, would I have preferred a CDKTF in Haskell, or a typed Nix dialect? Hell yes. CDKTF was awful, it was just the least bad thing around. Just like TF itself, in a way.
But I have little problems with HCL as a compilation target. Rich ecosystem and the abstractions seem sensible. Maybe that's Stockholm syndrome? Ironically, CDKTF has made me stop hating TF :)
Now that Hashicorp put the kibosh on CDKTF though, the question is: where next...