The Case for Terraform

Every year, someone declares Terraform dead. And every year, I'm still writing HCL.

The Competition

• Pulumi: Write infra in real languages. Great for developers, harder for ops teams.
• AWS CDK: Excellent for AWS-only shops. Falls apart for multi-cloud.
• Crossplane: Kubernetes-native IaC. Overkill for most use cases.

Why Terraform Wins

1. The Provider Ecosystem

3000+ providers. Need to manage your Cloudflare DNS, PagerDuty alerts, and AWS Lambda in one place? Terraform does it.

2. State Management (Done Right)

Yes, state can be tricky. But with S3 backend + native locking (no more DynamoDB!), it's rock solid.

terraform {
  backend "s3" {
    bucket       = "my-tf-state"
    key          = "terraform.tfstate"
    region       = "us-east-1"
    use_lockfile = true
  }
}

3. Plan Before Apply

I can show a product manager exactly what will change before it changes. Try that with a bash script.

4. It Just Works

No runtime dependencies. No agent to install. Download the binary, run terraform init, done.

The Bottom Line

Use Pulumi if your team is 100% developers. Use CDK if you're all-in on AWS. Use Crossplane if you're running a platform team.

For everything else? terraform apply.