terraform VS hcl

State Encryption was one of those long requested features[0] (I had it on my ideas list for years[1]) that Hashicorp didn't have much incentive to build. I don't think it has to with distancing opentofu as such, but the opentofu team prioritizing the right things that customers actually need.

[0]: https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/issues/9556

[1]: https://github.com/captn3m0/ideas#-mars-terraform-remote-htt...

https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/issues/34402

I’m not a lawyer and have no idea who is right or wrong but I understand why Hashicorp is scrutinizing this.

Just to give an example of the power of Go for CLI builds, you may have already used or at least heard of Docker, Kubernetes, Prometheus, Terraform, but what do they all have in common? They all have a large part of their usability via CLI and are developed in Go 🐿.

Each app’s front end is built with Qwik and uses Tailwind for styling. The server-side is powered by Qwik City (Qwik’s official meta-framework) and runs on Node.js hosted on a shared Linode VPS. The apps also use PM2 for process management and Caddy as a reverse proxy and SSL provisioner. The data is stored in a PostgreSQL database that also runs on a shared Linode VPS. The apps interact with the database using Drizzle, an Object-Relational Mapper (ORM) for JavaScript. The entire infrastructure for both apps is managed with Terraform using the Terraform Linode provider, which was new to me, but made provisioning and destroying infrastructure really fast and easy (once I learned how it all worked).

For example, integrating Terraform for infrastructure as code (IaC) into the IDP can streamline updates and rollbacks.

In this project, you will understand and get hands on experience around the entire concept around CI/CD from applications perspective. To fully gain real expertise around this idea, it is best to see it in action across different programming languages and from the platform perspective too. From the application perspective, we will be focusing on PHP here; there are more projects ahead that are based on Java, Node.js, .Net and Python. By the time you start working on Terraform, Docker and Kubernetes projects, you will get to see the platform perspective of CI/CD in action.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is an important part of any true hosting operation in the public cloud. Each of these platforms has their own IaC solution, e.g. AWS CloudFormation. But they also support popular open-source IaC tools like Pulumi or Terraform. A category of tools that also needs to be discussed is API gateways and other app-specific load balancers. There are applications for internal consumption, which can be called microservices if you have a lot of them. And often microservices use advanced networking options such as a service mesh instead of just the native private network offered by a VPC.

To quickly deploy the architecture, we will be using Terraform. With Terraform, we can automate the deployment process and have our infrastructure up and running in minutes.

Terraform HCL (HashiCorp Configuration Language) is an essential language for cloud engineers in 2024, particularly for those involved in infrastructure as code (IaC) practices. HCL is the configuration language used by Terraform, a widely adopted tool that enables engineers to define, provision, and manage cloud infrastructure using a declarative configuration approach. Learning Terraform HCL allows cloud engineers to automate the deployment and lifecycle management of cloud resources across various service providers, ensuring consistency, repeatability, and scalability of cloud environments.

Reminds me of [HCL](https://github.com/hashicorp/hcl), but without all the providers to deploy the config?

HCL: A Go implementation structured configuration language. The native syntax of HCL is inspired by libucl and nginx configurations. It is used to create a structured configuration language that is friendly to humans and machines, mainly for DevOps tools, server configurations, and resource configurations as a Terraform language.

HCL has a JSON representation [1], internally, objects behave that way. so it should be possible to write a Jsonnet wrapper around it. Terraform can currently parse json pipelines too.

[1]: https://github.com/hashicorp/hcl/blob/main/json/spec.md

>https://noyaml.com/

I'm not sure this is the criticism you think it is. Wow, so you basically have to add quotes to get strings in some ambiguous situations?

Yeah sure you could probably improve YAML by getting rid of these weird pitfalls, but that is a minor improvement. The alternative isn't something like TOML, because YAML is optimized for hierarchical configuration. It's every vendor implementing a different syntax such as Hashicorp with their HCL [0].

[0] https://github.com/hashicorp/hcl

The Hashicorp corporation has made a huge impact in providing valuable tools and platforms in the cloud ecosystem. The advantage of using the tools they provide, such as Terraform, Vault, and Packer, is that they all have the same language, Hashicorp Configuration Language (HCL). This means you can easily pick up any of these tools by learning HCL, which is similar to JSON. This approach can be useful when choosing tools to learn or use for a project.

Format is HCL language feature: https://github.com/hashicorp/hcl/blob/main/hclwrite/public.go

Hi, from what I read from HCL Github "HCL is a syntax and API specifically designed for building structured configuration formats.".

When the desired state is relatively simple to define and the mechanism to reach that state is not that important, writing up a declaration of what is needed and letting something/someone else deal with it is the most logical abstraction. This would be like drafting up the architectural draft for your new restaurant and paying a contracting company to actually build it, or writing HTML and letting a web browser render it, or writing a Terraform HCL file and letting the Terraform CLI tool apply it. This is called declarative programming in the software world, and has many advantages (and a few disadvantages!) for cloud infrastructure management.