I've been a fan of Terraform for a while now, and ...
# platform-toolboxs
Sarah Krasnik
09/26/2022, 2:42 PMI'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?
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Daniel Shepherd
09/26/2022, 2:53 PMI 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.
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Ravi Kotecha
09/26/2022, 2:53 PMlack of quality providers is a killer for me too
Ravi Kotecha
09/26/2022, 2:54 PMI went down this route with Auth0 provider and it had very limited functionality so we ended up maintaining our own fork
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Sarah Krasnik
09/26/2022, 2:54 PMAny 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?
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Daniel Shepherd
09/26/2022, 2:54 PMMy 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
09/26/2022, 3:01 PMI 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
09/26/2022, 3:02 PMIt doesn’t work great though and I end up spending lots of cycles maintaining or generalizing/abstracting things.
Daniel Shepherd
09/26/2022, 3:04 PMI’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
09/26/2022, 3:05 PMI’ve spent a fair bit of time thinking about building something like that myself 😄
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Sarah Krasnik
09/26/2022, 5:52 PMSame! 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.
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Nicolas Decoster
09/26/2022, 7:52 PMI’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.
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