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(almost-) weekly.tf - #26

(almost-) weekly.tf - #26

October 12, 2020

When I started this newsletter, I asked my professional-newsletter-writing-wife for advice. Number one thing she told me was: "don't call it weekly because then you have to write it every week"

Whoops.

Well last week didn't happen, I usually send on Thursdays but this week is going out on Monday. Such is the life of a side-project.

Terraform Best Practices for AWS users

If you use Terraform with AWS, this list of practices might be useful.

I can't say I agree with all of the listed practices, but even the ones I disagree with are good food for thought.

Here's the thing– these lists always do better if they clearly express the reason(s) for the practice. Many of them address real problems, but how would one know if they should use the practice if they don't know what problem is being solved?

Your Weekly Dose of Terraform Live Streams

Anton Babenko, a prolific producer of open source terraform code has started a weekly series of live streams. Each episode focuses on a different topic. So far there have been episodes on checkov, tflint, and terragrunt. Videos are also on Twitch.

terrasnek: Terraform Cloud Python Client Library

I have been doing a fair amount of work with Terraform Enterprise recently and found this library to be useful.

Tutorials on Creating Custom Terraform Providers

If you are looking to create a new Terraform provider, this new tutorial looks like a great place to start.

for_each for expression in json syntax

I don't write much Terraform in the JSON syntax, and you probably don't either, but this tip might just come in handy sometime. The JSON syntax requires wrapping some expressions in ${}. See docs on Expression Mapping for more info.

terraform-exec: Terraform CLI commands via Go.

Write Go code? Need to run Terraform commands? Need to automatically install Terraform? This library will handle all this for you (except writing the Go code).

template provider archived

You have probably used the template provider at some point. Did you know that it has been EOLed?

The provider has been replaced by the templatefile function in 0.12, a template directory module and a cloud-init specific provider.

It sounds like this should continue to work for the foreseeable future, but the project will not get any updates. So migrating to one of the new options probably makes sense.