weekly.tf #23

September 17, 2020

Terraform 0.13 has only been released recently and you probably haven't even upgraded to it yet. However a 0.14 alpha is already out. What? Yeah it appears that a different approach will be taken with 0.14, starting with an early alpha to get feedback on changes to diff output.

Teraform 0.13 has only recently been released, but the core team seems to be thinking ahead to 0.14. One feature being considered is a simpler view for plan diffs which omits more unchanged fields.

Also seems like there may be other alpha releases as development on 0.14 progresses.

Policy as code is clearly a trend these days. Between Hashicorp's Sentinel commercial offering and a number of terraform-specific tools there are lots of options. One converging trend seems to be a movement toward using Open Policy Agent.

Conftest is a tool which uses OPA to apply policy to a number of technology frameworks, including Terraform. This article does a decent job of walking through using conftest to apply policy to your terraform code.

I mis-read this as "providers" and assumed they mean providers, not provisioners. Provisioners.

Starting soon vendor-specific provisioners, like chef and ansible will be deprecated. Plan is to remove them outright in 0.15, so in like 2 years?

Got a lot of terraform-managed resources which are not tagged but should be tagged? This tool will walk your code and update it with the tags you specify.

I came across this tool as part of migrating my team to TFE.

It is, how do I say this nicely, a bit rough around the edges and has a number of annoyances. But, there is a big need for a TFE CLI and this at least sort fits in that hole. A better CLI would be awesome.

Notable Releases

Changelog lists a number of bug and build fixes, but this is supposedly also the version where vendor-specific provisioners are going to start being deprecated.

Just a new aws_db_proxy_default_target_group resource in this release.

The aforementioned alpha release of terraform.

A good number of bug fixes, especially for running tests. Definitely worth a quick upgrade if you are on v2.

Same as above.

Thanks for reading this week. As always, let me know what you think and send me links to related projects, guides or other terraform-related content.