HashiTalks 2021

The next HashiTalks is coming up on February 17-18. This is the HashiCorp virtual conference that has been going on since since 2019, a different era.

There is a schedule and registration form up, but not much else to go on.

From the schedule it appears that the event will be running for 48 hours straight with speakers from around the globe. The videos from the 2020 event are online if you want to get a sense for what this will be like.

Side note– it looks like at least some of the planning for this event has happened in the open on github.

Wait Conditions in the Kubernetes Provider

The two kubernetes providers have support for specifying wait conditions when operating on resources. These are conditions that must be true before terraform will continue to its next task.

The kubernetes provider has wait_for_rollout on kubernetes_deployment, wait_for_loadbalancer on the kubernetes_ingress resource and wait_for_completion on kubernetes_job.

Meanwhile, the kubernetes-alpha provider, which supports a more generic kubernetes_manifest resource also supports a generic wait_for block. This generic feature seems a bit rough around the edges. For example you cannot set a custom timeout. Still, a step in the right direction.

A Proposal For Terraform Logging · terraform-plugin-sdk

If you are a provider author, take some time to digest this proposal from Paddy Carver.

If nothing else you will probably learn a bunch about the current context of who logging works in Terraform. I know I did (see below).

The proposal, which will eventually become an internal HashiCorp RFC, seeks to layout a series of improvements to logging for terraform providers.

Things I learned from this proposal–

• in 0.15 you can control provider and core logs separately

• also in 0.15, logs for terraform core are structured

• provider authors are intended to use go-hclog, not the fmt or log packages, like I do

Pluralith

Pluralith is another contender in the "visualize your infrastructure based on your terraform state" product space. The app looks nice and the cli integration seems slick, but so far only AWS is supported and you have to upload your state files to their service, which is a non-starter for many users.

If only hashicorp would integrate something like this into Terraform Cloud/Enterprise…

Best static code analysis tool for Terraform?

I don't often drop links to reddit in this newsletter, but I found this one interesting. We talk a lot about Terraform analysis tools around here. It is clear that doing such analysis is useful and desired. There is not, however a clear favorite across the community.

Notable Releases

v0.14.6 · terraform

Mostly bug fixes along with support for AWS SSO in the backend.

v0.15.0-alpha20210210 · terraform

As previously reported, Terraform is releasing early snapshots of the 0.15 branch. These are done periodically and probably include half-baked work, so use them at your own risk.

Check the breaking changes, though, and see if there is anything you will be affected by.

v0.16.1 · atlantis

Despite looking like a semver patch release, this one includes new features and some breaking changes (upgrade of default terraform version).

v0.11.0 · terraform-docs

This release adds support for listing the resources created in a module and plugins. There is an SDK for plugins.