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Draw.io and Terraform = Brainboard, Graphical Way to Do Terraform

by chafik-bel on 12/25/20, 12:42 PM with 44 comments

• by chimen on 12/25/20, 10:53 PM

  Big fan of "talk to sales" or "contact us" pricing pages.

• by yegle on 12/25/20, 9:14 PM

  I recently gave a tech talk internally about Terraform. I wanted to show how quickly a web service can get complicated by showing the SVG generated from `terraform graph` output.

  It failed miserably:

  $ tf graph|dot -Tpng > graph.png

  dot: graph is too large for cairo-renderer bitmaps. Scaling by 0.420618 to fit

  Trying to upload the genrated image to Google Slides and the error message: The image is too large. Images must be smaller than 25 megapixels.

  $ tf state list|cut -d. -f3|grep ^google_|sort|uniq|wc -l

  42 <-- different types of Google Cloud resources we use in our Terraform configs.

  I'm very skeptical this config can be managed using a WYSIWYG tool.

• by nhoughto on 12/26/20, 11:51 AM

  All for trying to reduce env drift and divergence between things, but don’t think the documentation as the source of truth is the winning formula. Source of truth will inevitably be code (bc it has to capture the full weight of the complexity of your system), IaC is hard enough already with the dizzy height of the abstractions you are building on top of, having a system that adds another doesn’t seem like a winning formula to me.

  All for better visualizations of terraform resources tho

• by weitzj on 12/26/20, 11:25 AM

  This looks interesting. But as a developer I really would like my pull requests, linters and what not.

  This feels like the G-Programming language from LabView which allows you to graphically program your physics experiments. But once you drink the programming language coolaid you don’t want to do graphics programming any more.

  So I guess I am already biased towards reading text. But for me this is still the best way to consume information compared to pictures or videos

• by philipwhiuk2 on 12/25/20, 11:33 PM

  While: https://www.brainboard.co/static/js/main.af9695a1.chunk.js is loading the page is blank

  This file is large (15.7MB) and took 1.2 minutes to load

  So your website looks broken for 1.2 minutes for me.

  I doubt anyone else but a web-dev has the patience to wait for it.

• by satya71 on 12/26/20, 12:32 AM

  Having done some IAC myself, I’m struggling to see how this would work for anything but the simplest architecture.

  It’s like all the visual programming languages that become unusable as soon as the program achieves a bit of complexity.

• by pm90 on 12/25/20, 9:00 PM

  The idea is fantastic but I am very skeptical how this would handle state drift and larger projects.

  Anyways, being able to visualize infrastructure this way is pretty great. Currently, the way it usually works is to draw the infra and then manually write the tf resources. This seems like it would simplify the process greatly since one could genereate the IAC directly from the diagrams. Pretty neat (if it works well).

• by manojlds on 12/25/20, 6:55 PM

  Graphical way to do Terraform but hypes up Multi-Cloud front and center.

• by orf on 12/25/20, 6:13 PM

  No pull requests? Dead in the water. How do you handle change control?

• by insomniacity on 12/25/20, 9:29 PM

  Does it have Terraform Enterprise and Sentinel support?

• by dider52 on 12/25/20, 7:20 PM

  Very interesting, I have been looking for such a tool

• by felixhummel on 12/25/20, 6:14 PM

  s/versionned/versioned/

  Looks interesting. I'll try to break it with the complexity of a medium-sized project next year.