tflint VS OPA (Open Policy Agent)

‍TFLint is a Terraform linter focused on possible errors, best practices, and style conventions in your Terraform code.

TFlint is a powerful linter for Terraform, designed to catch errors and issues that terraform plan may not detect. As Terraform grows in popularity for infrastructure as code, the need for robust tools to ensure code quality and reliability becomes paramount. TFlint fulfills this need by analyzing Terraform configurations to find problems that are not covered by syntax checks. It checks for things like unsuitable AWS instance types, incorrect IAM policy syntax, and the use of deprecated syntax or features. By integrating TFlint into the development process, users can proactively identify potential problems, improving the stability and efficiency of their infrastructure deployments. This additional layer of validation is crucial for maintaining high standards in complex, cloud-based infrastructures.

Looking at the description, https://github.com/terraform-linters/tflint , I think it's not what I am looking for. The reason I used a different tcp port is to make the health check on load balancer fail. It's also the same as not changing the tcp port but developer making a code change in their javascript, nodejs, java, etc fail to start properly. If that happens, load balancer's health check will fail as well.

TFLint is an open-source infrastructure as code linter tool that helps developers and DevOps teams identify potential issues and errors in their Terraform code by checking the Terraform configuration files for best practices, coding standards, and policy compliance.

Indeed, that is the case, atm. Your comment got me searching a little bit more. It seems that they are planning to implement a flag for small fixes https://github.com/terraform-linters/tflint/issues/266

Sounds like tflint to me!

I created a .tflint.hcl with the following content: https://github.com/terraform-linters/tflint/blob/master/docs/user-guide/config.md (The example)

TFLint: This is a Terraform linter that checks for errors and best practices in your Terraform code. TFLint helps to catch common mistakes, such as variable name clashes, missing required variables, or invalid resource arguments. It also checks for compliance with best practices, such as naming conventions and resource ordering. By using TFLint, you can catch errors early on, which helps to improve the quality of your Terraform code.

tflint: Linter para Terraform, serve para avisar sobre problemas com sintaxe, erros nos principais provedores de nuvem, garantir boas práticas e outras coisas.

How can we handle this? Are there any mechanisms to prevent or at least to some extent safeguard this kind of issues without falling back to a manual workflow? There is. One huge advantage of sticking to (de-facto) standards like Terraform is that first we are probably not the first ones to come up with this question and second there is a huge ecosystem around Terraform that might help us with such challenges. And for this specific scenario the solution is the Open Policy Agent. Let us take a closer look how the solution could look like.

A popular Policy-as-Code tool for Terraform is OPA, everyone's favorite versatile open-source policy engine that enforces security and compliance policies across your cloud-native stack, making it easier to manage and maintain consistent policy enforcement in complex, multi-service environments.

Harness Policy As Code uses Open Policy Agent (OPA) as the central service to store and enforce policies for the different entities and processes across the Harness platform. In this section, you will define a policy that will deny a pipeline execution if there is no approval step defined in a deployment stage.

OPA: While OPA is an open-source, general-purpose policy engine capable of enforcing unified and context-aware policies throughout the stack, it can also accept and output data in formats such as JSON, effectively functioning as a tool for generating or modifying configurations. Although it does not provide out-of-the-box schema definition support, it allows the integration of JsonSchema definitions.

In essence, container image signing involves adding a digital stamp to an image, affirming its authenticity. This digital assurance guarantees that the image is unchanged from creation to deployment. In this blog, I'll explain how to sign container images for Kubernetes using Cosign and the Open Policy Agent. I will also share a tutorial that demonstrates these concepts.

In this post we will explores two powerful solutions for addressing this issue: the Open Policy Language (OPA) and Google’s Zanzibar.

Rego is a declarative query language from the makers of the Open Policy Agent (OPA) framework. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) accepted OPA as an incubation-level hosted project in April 2019, and OPA graduated from incubating status in 2021.

Now there are more subdivided practice: * Policy as Code: Sentinel, OPA * Database as Code: bytebase * AppConfiguration as Code: KusionStack, Acorn * ...... (Welcome to add more)