Hi HN, one of the founders here. We were thinking hard on what would lower the entry barrier / smoothen the learning curve for infrastructure. It's got to be easy to build so something visual probably; and it's got to be "real" so perhaps some kind of infra-as-code underneath. We experimented a lot with the low-code angle (the most recent OpsFlow which we got tons of feedback on from HN - thank you!!)<p>And then it hit us. With python, there's a huge difference in ease of use between a Jupyter notebook and locally run python code, even though the code is the same. So we don't even need to hide the code, as long as it is easy to write. Replit demonstrates the same concept even more vividly; but we thought we'd borrow the blocks idea from Jupyter / Google Colab.<p>This is how Terrabook came to be - just blocks of Terraform really. The key thing is that they are pre-filled, and you can write whatever you want.<p>a. Mix and match pre built terraform.
b. Modify pre built blocks to create your own custom terraform
c. Deploy to AWS in one click.<p>We also added templates for frontend, backend & databases - so you just click a button and get a working piece.<p>HN has been a constant source of constructive feedback for us, and we would be extremely grateful for insight on how you feel TerraBook is. Feel free to drop your harshest feedback in the comments below!
I understand Digger's philosophy of "always keep launching". You guys launch products on what seems like a weekly basis to see what might stick. All the products lead back to Digger. That being said, how is this specifically different than using Terraform modules? Is the big selling point just being able to click and generate terraform code? Is it different than what Brainboard is doing?
Feedback from someone that started with traditional datacenter infrastructure and is now dealing with cloud-infra automation.<p>I don't see Terraform as the best IaC framework for lowering the barrier to put infrastructure into developers hands (personally I think that product developers should develop and not worry about infrastructure, but that's a different conversation).<p>The difference in state management is pretty much the biggest difference between Ansible, Puppet, and Terraform - the first two you don't have to worry about it. With Terraform you do. You can't just rewrite code and give resources new names, if you do during a plan it will tell you that it wants to delete the old named resources and deploy the resources with new names.
I'm not sure how this is really useful. It's just a snippet library?<p>It still requires you understand terraform and AWS constructs, and if you understand those, you probably don't need this.