Is Terraform Really “DEAD”?
Terraform is DEAD! Just kidding, it is far from dead. It actually still many great use cases today BUT Gitops is definitely redefining what should be in terraform and would should be managed under a platform tool.
What is Gitops?
“GitOps is an operational framework based on DevOps practices, like continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) and version control, which automates infrastructure and manages software deployment. It enables developers to store the desired state of their infrastructure and use it to automate operational processes.” — Codefresh
Overall, in my opinion Gitops is the new framework that is “cloud native.” More buzz words 😛 Gitops is just another ideology on how you want to go about getting your “things” into production. Technically, you can use terraform for 90% of the things. Should you is the better question.
NOTE: I’ll stop you here because I do not want to waster your time. If you are not deploying your workloads into kubernetes this solution won’t be worth the engineering time for you. What I’m about to recommend with ArgoCD wouldn’t fit your use case. You can still follow the Gitops best practices which includes Terraform but you are better off with keeping things simple.
Why would implementing ArgoCD be more reliable
Using ArgoCD as your Continuous delivery system is one of the best solutions you can pick. ArgoCD has a huge open source community that is actively innovating on the solution. The tool itself keeps your workloads to a desired state that you define. This is helpful in two ways, one, the configuration of how the workload should be deployed is versioned inside a git repository. Second, the ArgoCD controller monitors the current state and will modify any manual changes back to the desired state.
By using ArgoCD you allow yourself to worry less about drift (manual changes) happening inside production and more about defining the production environment you want. Updating platform tooling like istio, karpenter and telemetry agents becomes pretty straight forward. All the changes take place behind a PR and then a PR to revert said changes if it fails (because we all have proper test prior to production).
Should you make the change?
If your workloads live in kubernetes then my answer is, yes. You should look into ArgoCD and the added benefits of doing so. If your team doesn’t have the support or knowledge to do so. One of our experienced consultants are here to help. Feel free to book a free 30 min consultation with one of our consultants today
