SE Radio 289: James Turnbull on Declarative Programming with Terraform

James Turnbull rejoins the show with Robert Blumen for a conversation mostly about Terraform, as well as a bit about Puppet. Terraform is a declarative programming tool for automating infrastructure resource creation; it targets resource providers, such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Digital Ocean, and other cloud and SAAS back ends. The discussion explores the programming language used by Terraform (TF); what TF does when it runs; why a declarative language is a good fit for infrastructure resource creation; and how infrastructure operation is becoming more like programming, with a build pipeline, testing, and deployment. The episode considers TF’s internals, its similarities and differences with Puppet, and some speculation about whether declarative programming is the future of programming.

Show Notes

Related links

• SE Radio episode 217: James Turnbull on Docker
• SE Radio episode 264: Service Discovery
• SE Radio episode 207: Vagrant
• HashiCorp Terraform
• Test-kitchen framework on github
• Mark Burgess home page
• The Terraform Book, by James Turnbull
• James Turnbull’s web site