Your Infra Isn't Special: Why Open Source Infrastructure as Code (iac) Wins

> The IaC ecosystem is not the Javascript ecosystem; If you use good modules, pin them to a specific version, and update when you need to then you won’t run into the dependency issues that you may have elsewhere.

That’s a half-truth. The IaC consulting I take part of is overwhelmed equally by npm and docker/helm dependency hell.

Sure, worms in npm. But just as many things breaking and getting deprecated in IaC land. Bitnami deprecating their charts. Zookeeper operator breaking on newer Linux kernels. Lagoon not respecting resource requests.

“But if you stick to the good packages!” works for any package ecosystem. It’s just that sometimes you don’t choose the packages.

My only counter-argument: sometimes it is cheaper to maintain your own fork of something. Sometimes it is cheaper to make your own thing.

If your infra isn't special, then you shouldn't require third-party modules. Knowing how to compose resources in a Terraform module is table stakes, and if you don't know what resources are involved and how they're configured, you're going to have a hard time troubleshooting things or extending them when your infra finally becomes special enough.

OTOH, if your infra is indeed special, then third-party modules become a hindrance. They add complexity for no clear gain.