weekly.tf #22

September 10, 2020

I am back from a week off last week and happy to see that thing were somewhat quiet.

A library and command line tool for inspecting Terraform configurations. There is no formal compatibility guarantees with the primary implementation, but I would bet this works better than the regular expressions you are currently using.

Learn more about using count and for_each, not more useful in Terraform 0.13.

Terraform 0.13 enables downloading 3rd party provider plugins from the registry. If you are not yet able to use that, this project can build a bash-based shim which can down the providers and install them in a pre-0.13-compatible manner.

As the article says:

Engineers are becoming the new cloud financial controllers as finance teams begin to lose some of their direct control over new fast-paced, on-demand infrastructure consumption models driven by cloud. So the question becomes: What are the people, processes, and technologies I can use to navigate this sea change?

In addition to a guide on using TF Cloud & Enterprise to manage costs, this piece gives a good summary on how to organize your company to manage costs, via a RASCI model. This stuff is complicated and the technology is not the hardest part.

If you don't want to go the enterprise route, there are a number of open source projects, like infracost and terraform-cost-estimation and the organizational know-how would still be relevant.

Even though this is a Terraform stan newsletter, learning about the alternatives is always useful.

Kubernetes is not simple. But as this guide demonstrates, complex infrastructure can be managed by Terraform without too much hassle.

Notable Releases

Terraform now supports network based mirrors for installing providers. This will be useful for anyone running Terraform in environments with no internet connectivity.