#87: Anton Babenko on Serverless.TF and the Terraform licensing fiasco
Nov 1, 2023
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Anton Babenko, AWS Community Hero, discusses Serverless.TF for serverless development with Terraform and the recent Terraform licensing controversy. He shares insights on simplifying serverless application development, exploring server.tf for Terraform modules, and the impact of HashiCorp's license change. The podcast also covers the negative atmosphere on Hiker News, upcoming sessions at reinvent, and Anton's expertise in Terraform and serverless applications.
Serverless.TF simplifies integrating serverless components into Terraform projects.
Anton clarifies that Terraform's recent license change primarily affects commercial offerings, not end-users.
Deep dives
The motivation behind the server.TF project
Anton Babenko developed server.TF to provide a solution for people who want to leverage the benefits of serverless or AWS but already have existing projects written in Terraform. He wanted to simplify the process by creating a tool that allows for the integration of serverless components into Terraform projects.
Challenges with using serverless framework and Terraform
Anton initially used the serverless framework for his application-related resources and Terraform for infrastructure management. However, he found this approach to be complex and required additional tools such as shell script and AWS CLI to connect everything together. He also struggled with the fragmentation between tools and the need to become an expert in multiple technologies. This led him to start the server.TF project to simplify the process and provide a seamless integration between Terraform and serverless.
Features and benefits of using server.TF
Server.TF allows users to easily connect their application code with Terraform resources, leveraging the power of Terraform's graph-based approach to handle dependencies and ordering of resource creation. It eliminates the need for manual packaging and deployment steps by automatically handling tasks such as rebuilding packages, uploading to S3, and updating Lambda function sources. The tool also integrates with local stack, enabling developers to run and test their code locally with emulated AWS resources. Overall, server.TF aims to provide a simpler development experience for building serverless applications with Terraform.
The license change in Terraform and its impact
The recent license change in Terraform from a Mozilla license to a business usage license has caused a stir within the community. However, Anton clarifies that the licensing change only affects companies building commercial offerings based on open source Terraform, such as competing products to HashiCorp's Terraform Cloud. The change does not affect end-users who are building applications with Terraform. Anton encourages users to stay informed and skeptical of exaggerated claims and misinformation circulating in the community.
In this episode, I spoke with Anton Babenko, who is an AWS Community Hero and creator of the Serverless.TF framework. We spoke at length about serverless development with Terraform and the problems that Serverless.TF aims to solve. We also discussed the recent seismic split in the Terraform community, with HashiCorp's license change and the initiation of the OpenTofu movement. Anton didn't hold back on his feelings about the oversized reaction to HashiCorp's announcement, and I agree with him!
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