Ask HN: Why was Terraform created?

But in majority of the cases developers are very much aware of environments their code run on - they know that their containers are stored in ECR, ran in ECS, their data is stored in S3 and RDS.

It is trivial to build a container, upload it to ECR and then deploy it to ECS from a shell script. And it is a lot more readable and comprehensible for a person not familiar with the tool.

Maybe I am the problem and I just don't get the declarative style, where you only describe the wanted state, not the steps you take to achieve that state?

If we assumed by default that our cloud infrastructure provider is AWS, wouldn't it be simple to write a shell script that would call `aws-cli` few times?

I came to that question, when discussing a problem my friend, a DevOps engineer, was having - he wasn't able to get the Azure Resource Group from his `foobar.tf` files and he ended up with something like the following:

    cat << EOF
      {
        "aksvnet": "$(az resource list --resource-group $1 | grep -i \"aks-vnet- | cut -d ":" -f2 | tr -d '", ')"
      }
    EOF

UPD: This question is for environments where all the engineers are (to some extent) familiar with %CloudProviderSDK% and bash. And, in my opinion, it's a lot easier to pick up bash and %CloudProviderSDK%, as those are imperative therefore closer to engineers' daily routine, as opposed to Terraform's declarative style. Shell scripts, in my opinion, are just more intuitive by default.