Terraform GitOps - When Should You Apply?

Once you've started to automate your Terraform deployments you'll quickly encounter two approaches: merge-after-apply and merge-before-apply. Suffice to say that each camp has its ardent supporters and detractors. My guest Soren Martius wrote an excellent blog post comparing and contrasting the two based on years of consulting and experience. I thought we could pick his brain a bit to better understand when to choose one over the other.

In this video we'll explore:

🌮 Automation approaches for Terraform
🌮 Merge after apply benefits and drawbacks
🌮 Merge before apply benefits and drawbacks

Here are the links for everything Soren and I mentioned:

Thank you so much for watching! Subscribe if you think I’ve earned it. Hit the bell as well if you’re feeling swell.❤️&🌮

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🌮 Other videos to check out:

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🌮 Timestamps:

⌚ 0:00 Intro
⌚ 0:44 Soren's background
⌚ 3:53 Terraform lack of standards
⌚ 6:11 Workflow approaches
⌚ 9:35 Apply after merge
⌚ 13:28 Apply before merge
⌚ 18:09 Platform requirements
⌚ 20:30 Evolving with growth
⌚ 23:30 Improving providers
⌚ 27:00 Learn more about Soren
⌚ 27:59 Final thoughts

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#terraform #hashicorp #devops #cloudengineer #gitops
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🌮 About Me 🌮

Ned is a curious human with a knack for creating entertaining and informative content. With over 20 years in the industry, Ned brings real-world experience to all his creative endeavours, whether that's pontificating on a podcast, delivering live instruction, writing certification guides, or producing technical training videos. He has been a helpdesk operator, systems administrator, cloud architect, and product manager. In his newest incarnation, Ned is the Founder of Ned in the Cloud LLC. As a one-man-tech juggernaut, he develops courses for Pluralsight, runs two podcasts (Day Two Cloud and Chaos Lever, and creates original content for technology vendors.

Ned has been a Microsoft MVP since 2017 and a HashiCorp Ambassador since 2020, and he holds a bunch of industry certifications that have no bearing on anything beyond his exceptional ability to take exams and pass them. When not in front of the camera, keyboard, and microphone, you can find Ned running the scenic trails of Pennsylvania or rocking out to live music in his hometown of Philadelphia. Ned has three guiding principles: Embrace discomfort, Fail often, and Be kind.

[christaverner]

This was really useful! Apply before merge here but well aware I'll need to change that when we scale up now

[johnlj]

Such a great episode, Ned! Great to hear the perspective of two consultants with 7+ years of experience with IaC; some of those throw-away-level comments really got me thinking! And I think a similar episode with a maintainer of one of the bigger providers would be excellent too. :)

[TobiasWolf]

When the comment was made that it is common to map IaC in a mono repo, a DevOps engineer somewhere fell over. :(

[Ajay-pjqr]

Hey
Can you explain or give some more examples on pre and post checks