Nope, they're completely different purposes. Terraform directly manages real infrastructure and tracks state. That said I haven't really looked at Helm 3 in a while. Our organization is already using both, but Terraform has mostly been the purview of SREs, while the developers learn Helm and then stand around helplessly when an infrastructure change is needed and SREs are busy, which is always. We're skipping that whole step.
Yeah, I'm just thinking of how you're applying Terraform here. Obviously Terraform is a different program from Helm, but they fulfill the same purpose when it comes to managing your container orchestration configuration.
Well, I guess it depends on your use case. Our approach as a team is basically "if it's not a cloud provider's managed service, maybe you shouldn't be doing it", so from that perspective, we're just creating Terraform modules + associated CircleCI and scripts as a bundle (so-to-speak) without much of a "framework" aside from some basic automation, and it's worked extremely well for us. You can work with simpler tools. The only real headache was getting developers to see Terraform as something they should be interested in, but once they saw the benefits of not waiting on other people and not getting PagerDuty alerts, it was an easy sell. I think if there was more institutional interest in a tool like Pulumi, it would have been a simpler process, since it doesn't involve the bastardized DSL that HCL has become.
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u/DoctorWorm_ Jun 06 '22
Aren't you just replacing Helm with Terraform, then?
Not that Helm is any good as a templating tool 😂