Terraform is a powerful tool, but it is not without its shortcomings. The configuration language is verbose and repetitive. There is no clearly established way to structure projects, and it can be a challenge to effectively modularize your code. Bootstrapping projects often involves manually solving chicken-and-egg issues via multiple applies. You have almost no visibility into the current state of your infrastructure, and trying to get your head around all of the resources in a larger system can take hours of research.
But what if you had a map?
In this talk, I’ll be discussing Tansley, an application that pairs Lisp’s code as data with infrastructure as code. Tansley enables you to visualize your infrastructure as you build it, generate Terraform with Clojure, and query that configuration with Datalog.
Tansley is CAD for cloud architecture—a map with a REPL.
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J.D. Hollis is a designer and engineer with over 15 years of experience creating digital products and platforms. He helps early stage startups launch at scale with cloud-native architecture and strong DevOps practices.
