I ve been a fan of Terraform for a while now and had this ob

Question

I ve been a fan of Terraform for a while now and had this obsession with Terraforming everything They don t exist but I m curious if anyone in this group would benefit from Terraform providers for common SaaS tools for business teams like BI tools Looker CRMs Salesforce or automation platforms Make If so how I find there s such sprawl in configuration but a lot of hesitancy in using tools that require teams of engineers to maintain when there are other options Thoughts

Daniel Shepherd · Answer

I am also obsessed with Terraforming everything I find that a lack of providers or a lack of quality providers definitely hinders adoption though The other problem with Terraform is that it does not lend itself to being used by non engineers

Ravi Kotecha · Answer

lack of quality providers is a killer for me too

Ravi Kotecha · Answer

I went down this route with Auth0 provider and it had very limited functionality so we ended up maintaining our own fork

Sarah Krasnik · Answer

Any other providers you both miss the most have tried to use but failed due to quality I agree biggest problem with TF is no option for non engineers Have either of you seen any solutions alternatives here

Daniel Shepherd · Answer

My team uses MongoDB Atlas heavily but their API and TF provider are so bad that we just maintain those resources manually or with some custom scripts

Daniel Shepherd · Answer

I haven t found a solution that works as an option for non engineers I work on a product team that makes a general purpose low code platform for automation think Zapier for IT sysadmins and I have tried to use it to make these things accessible to non engineers by gluing Terraform and other tools together

Daniel Shepherd · Answer

It doesn t work great though and I end up spending lots of cycles maintaining or generalizing abstracting things

Daniel Shepherd · Answer

I d love something that let non engineers build using TF in a low no code type of builder environment and then allowed an admin me to put policy guardrails around what they could build

Daniel Shepherd · Answer

I ve spent a fair bit of time thinking about building something like that myself smile

Sarah Krasnik · Answer

Same But alas I think there are so many other things Terraform can power in the configuration world Happy to chat more about what you re thinking

Nicolas Decoster · Answer

gt I d love something that let non engineers build using TF in a low no code type of builder environment and then allowed an admin me to put policy guardrails around what they could build It would be great to have some kind of TF or other IaaC visual programming for non experts It s something I want to try to build prototype sometime maybe starting with simple block programming à la Scratch Not sure when but I m very interested by this subject