You don’t appreciate Terraform until you have hundreds of AWS resources with dozens of security rules. But once you develop that appreciate it becomes an indispensable tool in managing and scaling your infrastructure. I’m a huge fan of Terraform and recently started moving a bunch of my personal project resources into Terraform.

I imagine for most people it’s a chore but I find the entire process zen-like. I take something that was a mess and clean it up while learning something new. My approach has been to create a placeholder resource and then do a “terraform import” to fetch the properties. Then I go through a series of “terraform plan"s to reconcile the differences.

What I wish was for Terraform to allow me to point it to a cloud resource and then have it generate the corresponding HCL that I can then migrate over to the .tf files. I can see why this isn’t built in: the entire point of Terraform is to link various resources together so just seeing a static set of properties for a given resource won’t tie them all together. At the same time, I’d rather have the option to see my entire resource in HCL and then decide what I want to remove, replace, or keep. Had I used Terraform from the beginning this wouldn’t have been a problem but for those of us that are migrating a ton of legacy resources it would be a big help.