I've been chasing infrastructure-as-code for a while, but I keep getting blocked by Terraform missing provider APIs (GCP Cloud Function Runtimes outside Nodejs, most recently), Kubernetes complexity, and generally being too lazy to sit down and bang out something in code that I can quickly iterate on with a console or quick CLI commands. I've had some wins with Serverless Framework, but outside that I've yet to see the payoff from the time I have put towards it. Am I defective?
Infrastructure as code becomes progressively more important as you add resources until you're at the point where terraform does the job of a whole team of administrators who would be spending all day clicking through UIs.
The UI is often a good way to quick get things done. Terraform requires a bit more investment, but has a huge payoff in the long run.
Personally, I think staging/production is the greatest advantage. I can experiment and break things on staging, then when I apply the plan to production I can be confident I’m getting the same infrastructure.
Infrastructure-as-code brings many programming amenities. You can write comments. You can easily see what a resource depends on and you can grep the repository to see what depends on it. You can version control it, which gives you a record of who changed what and possibly why. You can do code reviews.
It does take more time then clicking through a UI, but I can’t imagine operating all but the smallest infrastructure without Terraform or similar.
No not defective; sounds like you could use some ansible in your life.
It's easy to misuse ansible though. People try to consume it like puppet and use it for whole-system-declarative-state, which is usually not worth the squeeze in ansible.
Treat it as glorified bash-scripting with smarter data handling and yaml-driven config files, and you'll have success.
