Outgrowing Terraform - Nic Cope, Upbound & Dalorion Johnson, Guidewire
summary
Guidewire runs about 73,000 lines of HCL across a three-layer Terraform design and hits concrete limits: drift between S3 state and Git, provider/version coupling that delayed a module feature rollout by a month, and brittle access control bound to AWS IAM. Crossplane replaces CLI runs with an always-on control plane reconciling every 30–60 seconds, centralizes provider upgrades, maps business APIs to Kubernetes RBAC for safer self‑service, and is being piloted for S3 and ECR composition though it currently lacks a Terraform‑style data source.
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chapters (13)
- 0:00Intro
- 1:04Terraform at Guidewire
- 3:56Limitation: Drift
- 6:03Drift in Crossplane
- 8:54Limitation: Versioning
- 10:45Versioning in Crossplane
- 13:45Limitation: Access Control
- 16:03Access Control in Crossplane
- 18:33Limitation: Discoverability
- 20:57Discoverability in Crossplane
- 23:54Limitation: Cognitive Overhead
- 25:15Overhead in Crossplane
- 27:20Crossplane at Guidewire
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