We typically try to avoid making subjective, boasty claims in our
documentation in recent times, but there remained both some older
documentation that we've not recently revised and also some newer examples
that are, in retrospect, also perhaps more "boasty" than they need to be.
We prefer not to use this sort of boasty language because not everyone
using Terraform has the same background and experience, and so what is
"easy" or "intuitive" to one person may not be so to another person, and
that should not suggest that the second person is in any way wrong or
inadequate.
In reviewing some of our use of the word "easy" here I tried as much as
possible to surgically revise the existing content without getting drawn
into a big rewrite, but in some cases the content was either pretty
unsalvageable (due to talking about obsolete features that were removed
long ago) or required some broader changes to make the result hopefully
still get the same facts across. In those cases I've both removed some
content entirely or adjusted larger paragraphs.
This was not an exhaustive review and so I'm sure there's still plenty of
room for similar improvements elsewhere. I also resisted the urge to
update some pages that contain outdated information about currently-active
features.
Terraform's design assumes that each remote object in Terraform's care is
bound to one resource instance and one alone. If the same object is bound
to multiple instances then confusing behavior will often result, such as
two resource configurations competing to update a single object, or
objects being "left behind" when all existing Terraform deployments are
destroyed.
This assumption was previously only implied, though. This change is an
attempt to be more explicit about it, although these are additions to some
older documentation sections that have not been revised for some time and
so this is just a best effort to make this information discoverable
without getting drawn into a full-on reorganization of these sections.
While revising this there were some particular oddities that I decided to
revise while I was there, but I'll leave a fuller revision of this older
content for a later commit when we have more time to review it in greater
detail.
* add TencentCloud COS backend for remote state
* add vendor of dependence
* fixed error not handle and remove default value for prefix argument
* get appid from TF_COS_APPID environment variables
There are some differences between the Terraform CLI and Terraform Cloud ideas of workspaces.
This documentation aims to explain those differences and show different patterns for configuring the remote backend and the implications of different approaches.
The Terraform Enterprise brand has now been split into two parts:
- Terraform Cloud is the application that helps teams use Terraform together,
with remote state storage, a shared run environment, etc.
- Terraform Enterprise is the on-premise distribution that lets enterprises run
a private instance of the Terraform Cloud application.
The former TFE docs have been split accordingly.
After some discussion with "iamakulov" on Twitter it seems that the use
of the word "conflicts" and "merge conflicts" here was sounding like us
implicitly condoning the use of version control as a mechanism for
distributing local state files, which hasn't been recommended for quite
some time since remote state now provides a much more robust solution.
While here, I also tweaked some other language on this page for style and
for use of terminology we more commonly use in our more recent
documentation.
In an earlier commit we added the "Best Practices" situation to try to
clarify the intended uses of named workspaces and to warn against using
them as an alternative to system decomposition.
However, the prior statement was cautious in its recommendations in the
interests of being pragmatic, and as a result we've seen that users have
in some cases misunderstood or disregarded these recommendations.
The new "When to use Multiple Workspaces" section aims to be more explicit
that having multiple separate Terraform configurations is the preferred
solution for many use-cases, and that workspaces are intended for a
more limited set of use-cases around convenient development and testing.
It also emphasizes the analogy to version control branches that was just
a footnote in the prior text, to help the reader become familiar with the
concept by relating it to a concept and workflow they are hopefully
already familiar with.
This new section also attempts to provide a more elaborate description of
the proposed alternative when the goal is system decomposition. In the
long run some of this content would probably be better placed elsewhere
since it is useful advice even for users who never discover named
workspaces, but it can live here for the time being to limit the scope of
this change until we are ready to make more comprehensive revisions to
the docs in this area.
Finally, the introductory documentation here is adjusted slightly in
preparation for the intended future expansion of workspaces to include
stored variable values and, for more tailored backends like Terraform
Enterprise, a full log of prior operations. More revisions will be
required to cover the specifics of this later, but this new framing will
hopefully help users form a mental model of named workspaces that has
room for these future enhancements and the corresponding concept in
Terraform Enterprise, rather than our previous framing that workspaces
are fundamentally just named states.
Martin Atkins