Our great sponsors
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WorkOS
The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.
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xo
Command line tool to generate idiomatic Go code for SQL databases supporting PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server (by xo)
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Pulumi
Pulumi - Infrastructure as Code in any programming language. Build infrastructure intuitively on any cloud using familiar languages 🚀
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Knex
A query builder for PostgreSQL, MySQL, CockroachDB, SQL Server, SQLite3 and Oracle, designed to be flexible, portable, and fun to use.
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.
"But," you say, "programming languages with solid type systems, like Rust, can also do that for you." That is true, and this was not an attempt to disparage them, merely to show that you aren't losing anything by using SQL as the representation. There are, however, ways SQL goes above and beyond. By defining unique, not-null, and check constraints on top of a rich type system the database can prevent you from inserting faulty data to a greater degree than even Rust, as the constraints can be against the live state of your infrastructure itself. Instead of code needing to deal with unexpected values further down the line, the faulty data can be prevented from ever being inserted. Rust's compiler making sure that you handle every possible branch is an awesome thing, but SQL has the power to make more of these branches impossible in the first place.
SQL is an old, irregular language to work with, but it is better known than HCL and SQL already has it's own Pulumi/CDK in the form of every ORM with introspection (like Javascript's Prisma, Python's Django, Go's XO etc) and QueryBuilder (LINQ, Knex, etc) in whatever programming language you prefer. You probably already know it.
Needing to learn Terraform's HCL language to make infrastructure changes has been cited as a weakness that can be mitigated by wrapping it in the syntaxes more familiar to the user like Terraform CDK, Pulumi, or AWS CDK. This is a weakness, but we believe that the HCL-to-Statefile transformation being surjective instead of bijective is actually the bigger issue.
Integrate the database into your application itself with a postgres client library allowing your applications to make infrastructure changes (like provisioning sharded resources for a client that wants isolation, or using a more accurate forecasting model to pre-allocate more resources before the storm hits).
SQL is an old, irregular language to work with, but it is better known than HCL and SQL already has it's own Pulumi/CDK in the form of every ORM with introspection (like Javascript's Prisma, Python's Django, Go's XO etc) and QueryBuilder (LINQ, Knex, etc) in whatever programming language you prefer. You probably already know it.