terraformer VS inframap

‍Terraformer is a CLI tool developed by Google that generates Terraform files from existing infrastructure (reverse Terraform), simplifying the process of adopting Terraform in existing environments and speeding up the initial setup process. Terraformer supports multiple cloud providers, including AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, and others.

Looking into efficient ways to import existing infrastructure. Using Terraformer to get the everything into Terraform and then refactoring into modules, for_each, etc. using moved blocks seems like it would be a good approach. Refactoring them to use existing modules from providers will take a little work and likely going back and forth with terraform plan, and assuming many things won't translate straight across because of what resources a module might be creating and how they are creating them.

We had thought about the ability to convert HCL to Go, but not much thought in querying existing infra to generate HCL (like terraformer). If you want to experiment building on top of Lingon then please go ahead! I’d be happy to help provide the context from Lingon.

If "ClickOps" is your starting point, as you mention, you could try creating a new scratch cloud provider account, do all your "ClickOps", then use a TF export tool (e.g., Terraformer) to see the exported TF resources to find all the references to other TF resources in the cloud resource dependency chain.

I haven't worked with any of the ones that purport to work with AWS, but a quick Google shows terraformer and Terracognita as options - maybe look into trying those out?

This maybe a bit more complicated if you're not into coding/terraform but I'd use terraformer to convert all of your infrastructure from implementation to code while in AWS, then switch providers and with a bit of jiggly of the code implement your infra into gcs as IaC and keep it that way if/when you switch again.

Maybe terraformer could help. I never tried it personally . https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/terraformer

I've been wondering if this tool is any good. https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/terraformer/blob/master/docs/aws.md

If you've to write the code (I assumed you just needed to reorganize it without TG) maybe consider https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/terraformer

Like Blast Radius, InfraMap generates visual graphs of your infrastructure based on Terraform state or configurations, offering a visual overview of your infrastructure, which is especially helpful for large and complex environments.

We also contribute to the open-source community with projects like InfraMap, that generate your infra diagram on the fly based on your tfstate or the most famous TerraCognita, a reverse Terraform.

Pretty cool. The biggest thing I think is missing from many popular diagramming tools is the ability to easily diff the architecture across changes. Although that can already be done with graphviz source files.

However, these days I prefer to just have diagrams generated from the source code itself, like:

- https://github.com/cycloidio/inframap

- https://graphviz.org/Gallery/directed/bazel.html

In order to make a compelling use case out of having to maintain a parallel definition like this, I think it needs to be able to contribute to analysis like formal verification or, despite them stating that it's not a goal, being able to create the described architecture. Or even generate something like a terraform plan. Otherwise it falls victim to the same problem as any other method of creating diagrams, that of them falling out of sync with the system.

They are a long way there already by providing a way to use a programming language backed by a large ecosystem of other tools that can be used to work with e.g. terraform, like python/go.

I used https://github.com/cycloidio/inframap last week, was a good experience for me

Inframap reads your tfstate or HCL to generate a graph specific for each provider, showing only the resources that are most important/relevant.

Also if you want to easily visualize your HCL or TFState we did https://github.com/cycloidio/inframap which will allow you to visualize those in a more easy/readable way than just JSON.