Found a new terraform course and started learning terraform. Course is 7 hours long. The course is now 8 days old. I started following it on day 3 when it came out and ive only passed through 1h 20min for these 5 days. What the fuck? I thought terraform is gonna be easy and quick to learn. This feels like im learning an entirely new fucking language. A new fucking realm of SWE world. Shit takes up so much time. And now I'm just waiting for someone to come here and trashtalk terraform! Any tech stack i choose to learn, someone always comes here to write how it's shit! Go ahead tell me why terraform is shit

It's not shit, and has it's use case.

Problem here is you thinking that because "mAh dEgRee" you'll be able to learn this in 7 hours.

Of course it's like a new language, because it is. Anything with inputs, outputs, ifs and loops is Turing complete.

But like so many other instances, you think you can easily get a grasp on it while lacking many of the basic and common concepts.

I use it for deployments on work and it works great. You don't have ultimate flexibility but it works fine for most things. There are some disadvantages but every technology has that.

Personally I recommend just fucking around with it because yes its really easy. When you want to add a resource, look at the docs and learn it.

I love terraform. I kinda didn’t like the way it does some things, especially when it comes to reusability. But it could just be me sucking. I use it with CDKTF using golang instead, though it comes with its own set of confusing parts.

The problem of course is that you still have to know wtf is happening with the .tf files and their results, but it has been more enjoyable for me.
The only absolute pain is figuring out AWS policies, but that’s not terraform’s problem.

You sum up pretty much the general problem with anything regarding infrastructure as code.

It's not the tool that's problematic.

Infrastructure *was* and *will* always be a hard topic.

It has gotten harder with cloud and all it's shenanigans...

But mostly not because Cloud = new or Cloud = harder...

More because you now configure public reachable services, so the usual "fire and forget" snowflake servers don't cut it.

Fire and forget in the sense of "who cares, it's a private network" style.

You have to have a plan *before* you configure shit. That's not new.

It's just now enforced, because you cannot get away with crap anymore.

If you pull crap, it might cost you not just your job, but give you a lifetime of bills to pay for because your server was abused and no insurance covers obvious neglect.

Stop crying, start learning and don't blame the tool for your own tardiness.

Infrastructure is hard. And pretty much ruthless, cause a fucked up live system costs a lot of bucks.

@IntrusionCM is totally right.
Infrastructure is hard. It's a steep learning curve and you got to know what you're doing or you end up with a pile of shit. But if you persevere and do it step by step, you will get rewarded.

Rome was not built in 7 hours. Neither should your infrastructure.

and it feels like you are covering too much ground too fast. Usually in a team there's somebody that specializes on these things. or a whole team for this kind of stuff.

It is possible to be able to know everything but it takes time

@iceb am i overengineering a mvp product?

@b2plane

You are.
An MVP product does not require terraform at all. You can most likely get by with just a simple instance and some managed resources like DB, etc (which can probably also run in your instance anyway).

Don't delude yourself, your MVP is not gonna hit the levels of traffic for terraform or other infrastructure automation solutions to be worth it anytime soon.

damn, turns out a lot of people are jumping on the terraform bandwagon. Seems like its growing fast.

Also, AWS really needs a flow chart for all the fucking services it provides.

@Wisecrack the last interview i had which was perfect and i knew everything he asked me if i had ever worked with terraform before. I said not yet but i plan to learn it the next week. He said to definitely learn it. I wasnt offered a job just because i havent worked for years in a company before