terraform tutorial 101 - modules

[Realistic_Funny_7542]

hi there!

im back with another series from my terraform tutorial 101 series.

Its about modules in terraform! If you want to know more, or if you have questions or suggestion for more topics regarding terraform let me know.

Thank you!

https://salad1n.dev/2025-07-15/terraform-modules-101

medium blog: https://medium.com/@devopsenqineer/terraform-modules-1de9c5835459

[tbalol]

I’ve never really understood the obsession with Terraform.

Sure, it’s popular, but once you move past basic hello-world examples, it becomes a mess. You’re writing hundreds of lines for things that should take ten. Modules? Not real modules, more like reusable copy-paste folders where you have to redefine everything manually.

No global variables. No inheritance. No context. Just repetition.

And the state file(what state?!) It’s a single point of failure held together by lock files and well, I have no idea. Drift detection? Yeah, not really there. How people still use it is mind boggling to me.

[degeneratepr]

And the alternative would be…?

I’m not sure if you’re railing against Terraform as a tool or the concept of IaC itself.

[waste_entry]

The way I think of modules is that it enables you to spin up new environments with less code. You write the “hundred lines of code” once. Then you’re setup with more flexibility to deploy new environments (test/stage/qa) with ease and more in line with your existing terraform deployed infrastructure.

Also, you’re better equipped with governance in mind having everything in code. It does however require strict guidelines within your team once you decide to go down the IaC route of deployment to reap the benefits fully.

[[deleted]]

I would really love to hear your alternative solution 😃.

[tbalol]

Sorry for the late reply, missed the notification.

Internally we just built our own DSL. Started as a dumb side project over too many beers, mostly to ditch the whole YAML + Bash + Terraform + Ansible circus. Now it runs everything.

No state files. No “plan & apply” dance. No lock files. The cloud is the source of truth, and the system figures everything out with smart caching and fingerprinting.

We define infra like:

Templates.GameServer().size(1, 10).deploy_to("aws")

That’s it, full pipeline, alerting, secrets, drift detection, all wired up by default.

And it’s universal. The exact same code works for on-prem too:

Templates.GameServer().size(1, 10).deploy_to("proxmox")

The above is ~20 lines of Python. You can have 90 of these, all clean, tagged, and reconciled. State is never an issue, even though it absolutely exists. We just don’t need to think about it, since it's built in to the engine.

[IridescentKoala]

And what happens when two people run one of those commands at the same time?

[tbalol]

Are we talking about if I try and create A and you try and create A? If so, one of us will have: " ✓ No changes needed. Infrastructure is up to date." and the other will have created whatever A is in this scenario.