Hey everyone!

So a huge thanks to Hashiconf for letting me come out and talk about this stuff in person! But for those of you who missed it, or want more information there is also this blog on the matter as well.

So this is just a quick technical follow up of the tool terraformctl that I used in my session to get Terraform up and running inside of Kubernetes as a controller!

What is terraformctl?

A command line tool and gRPC server that is pronounced Terraform Cuddle.

The GitHub repo can be found here!

It’s a philosophical example of how infrastructure engineers might start looking at running cloud native applications to manage infrastructure. The idea behind the tool is to introduce this new way of thinking, and not necessarily to be the concrete implementation you are working for. This idea is new, and therefore a lot of tooling is till being crafted. This is just a quick and dirty example of what it might look like.

Terraformctl follows a simple client/server pattern.

We use gRPC to define the protocol in which the client will communicate with the server.

The server is a program written in Golang that will handle incoming gRPC requests concurrently while running a control loop.

The incoming requests are cached to a mutex controlled shared point in memory.

The control loop reads from the shared memory.

Voila. Concurrent microservices in Go!

What is cloud native infrastructure?

Well it’s this crazy idea that we should start looking at managing cloud native infrastructure in the same way we manage traditional cloud native applications.

If we treat infrastructure as software then we have no reason to run the software in legacy or traditional ways when we can truly concur our software by running it in a cloud native way. I love this idea so much that I helped author a book on the subject! Feel free to check it out here!

The bottom line is that the new way of looking at the stack is to start thinking of the layers that were traditionally managed in other ways as layers that are now managed by discreet and happy applications. These applications can be ran in containers, and orchestrated in the same ways that all other applications can. So why not do that? YOLO.

What Terraformctl is not..

Terraformctl is not (and will never be) production ready.

It’s a demo tool, and it’s hacky. If you really want to expand on my work feel free to ping me, or just out right fork it. I don’t have time to maintain yet another open source project unfortunately.

Terraformctl is not designed to replace any enterprise solutions, it’s just a thought experiment. Solving these problems is extremely hard, so I just want more people to understand what is really going into these tools.

Furthermore there are a number of features not yet implemented in the code base, that the code base was structure for. Who knows, maybe one day I will get around to coding them. We will see.

If you really, really, really want to talk more about this project. Please email me at kris@nivenly.com.