ArticCon 2022 (continued)

The main difference with language bindings

You now have a means to control;

• Defining the configuration syntax
  • You might choose to use language facilities, JSON, YAML, XML, or whatever
• How you read in the configuration
  • ordering, merging behavior, etc
• You can actually do some useful transformations

tl’dr you get to use an actual programming language to generate terraform compatible JSON. Terraform still tracks the dependencies and hands the heavy lifting off to the providers.

It’s important to note that the program you write only runs while generating the terraform configuration. It has completed execution prior to changes being applied.