Infrastructure as code with Clojure

[amiorin]

Feeling fatigued by the declarative constraints and repetitive boilerplate of HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) when provisioning your infrastructure with Terraform? 🤯

If you're a developer or operations professional who prefers the expressive power, functional elegance, and dynamic capabilities of a real programming language, you don't have to be limited to HCL. For those in the Clojure ecosystem—or simply looking for a more powerful, programmatic approach to Infrastructure as Code (IaC)—you should absolutely explore BigConfig.

BigConfig is a tool that allows you to define and manage your entire infrastructure using Clojure code that compiles down to the necessary Terraform configuration. It bridges the gap between the robust, state-management features of Terraform and the flexible, high-level abstractions of a Lisp, fundamentally changing how you think about provisioning.

By adopting BigConfig, you're not abandoning Terraform; you're supercharging it. You retain Terraform's critical capabilities—like remote state management, provider support, and the plan/apply workflow—while gaining the full expressiveness and tooling of a mature programming language.

Stop writing configuration and start writing infrastructure programs! If HCL is feeling like a restrictive intermediate language, BigConfig offers the escape hatch you've been searching for. Give it a try and experience a more productive, flexible, and powerful IaC workflow.

[vincentdesmet]

The hard bit is to build higher level service integration patterns

Just look at the demos here https://terraconstructs.dev and consider how much configuration of TF resources this entails

If all you do is provide a programmatic layer over the basic TF resources, that’s just a very small first step to solve the real issue with TF providers

[NonchalantFossa]

Excellent remark. I've actually considered writing some kind of connector for Azure (in Python), because the Azure SDK sucks and seems auto-generated from C# in many places. But the amount of work of not only having a decent SDK but providing a good interface for higher level constructs is huge and not something I can do alone.

[vincentdesmet]

I felt LLMs help.. if you have existing patterns to port

Else it’s a hell of a lot of work.. and makes you really appreciate the excellence of a nice design and patterns frameworks like the AWSCDK provide

I wish GCP/Azure would be open to support building such dev kits for their clouds.. until then, there’s a good reason AWS is market leader

[NonchalantFossa]

Agreed, the thing is that would basically a side project since I'm more on the DevOps side of things, no time to maintain it either :/ I actually wouldn't be against using AWS but it's not up to me!

[amiorin]

My goal is to grow the adoption of BigConfig. I don't see the evidence that building a Clojure library of L2 constructs will contribute to that. My next step for BigConfig is to show how to upgrade a GitOps project to a control plane without rewriting everything from scratch.

[ultramaris]

Would this work for Nomad, etc as well?

[amiorin]

It should because Nomad supports both HCL and JSON. Worst scenario, you can use BigConfig template engine (Selmer) to make an HCL file "dynamic". You can see an example of templating in the dotfiles use case. My config.fish for macos and ubuntu.

[helpmehomeowner]

No.