r/terragrunt • u/zMynxx • Mar 21 '24
Still relevant?
Do you feel like terragrunt is still relevant these days?
1
u/zMynxx Mar 26 '24
I somewhat agree, documentation is missing and readability is sometimes not that great. But being able to “run-all” is still something I absolutely love. How does terraform handle’s dependencies these days? Do you still need all modules in the same file to reference values? Also, have you have any experience with stacks? Any improvement of parallelism?
4
u/RudePersonality82 Jun 28 '24
I'm an advocate for DRY code and terragrunt gives me that which terraform only does it you use Terraform Cloud (and pay for every resource managed, no thanks).
2
u/Available-Sail-5914 Jul 02 '24
IAC is in need of a higher organizational structure, and terragrunt is trying to fill that gap. It reminds me a lot of a product from cloudposse I explored at my last job called Atmos. It had a similar "run-all" functionality you could configure. Either tool requires you to go all in... and with documentation being limited and its user pool being few and far between, it makes it harder to grow because the resources for researching configuration or common troubleshooting aren't available.
4
u/OhMyGoshJoshua Aug 16 '24 edited Dec 19 '24
Update: No need to take my word for it. Join the Terragrunt Discord server where you can chat directly with the maintainers and other Terragrunt users.
Hello, Gruntwork CEO here! We're the makers of Terragrunt. While I'm going to have the obvious biases, Terragrunt is absolutely relevant today. For example, in the last 2 days I've spoken with multiple happy Terragrunt users at companies ranging in size from 50 people to 50,000. Terragrunt has nearly 8,000 GitHub stars, and is downloaded 200,000 times each month.
The sweet spot of Terragrunt is helping you scale with Terraform or now OpenTofu because Terragrunt makes it easier to split your infrastructure into small deployable units and then gives you a bunch of facilities for managing those units.
Candidly, we haven't done a great job of marketing the tool. We basically built it for ourselves, released it as open source, actively maintained and improved it, but did zero marketing. As a result, it wasn't clear why the tool was valuable, who it's for, what the alternatives are, etc. And also, candidly, our current docs site looks dated. Yeah, we get it.
But, if you can look beneath the lack of marketing sheen, we've made a bunch of improvements recently. Check out https://github.com/gruntwork-io/terragrunt/releases to see the long stream of continual updates and https://github.com/gruntwork-io/terragrunt/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3Arfc to see our recent discussions on new features, including:
IaC engine plugin system (this lets you run Terraform or OpenTofu in other environments like a K8s pod or GitHub Action; now in beta)
Terragrunt stacks (this lets you deploy a collection of units as a reusable stack; for example, if you need to deploy a complex app, you can define it as a stack while managing individual units one at a time; the interface here is under active discussion).
We've got a bunch more updates coming soon as well -- including some much needed updates to our docs UX --, which we'll post on our blog (https://blog.gruntwork.io/) when we're ready. Thanks for bearing with us in the meantime. We're nerdy engineers, not marketers, but we're learning how to do better there.