On: Terraform should have remained stateless

[pst]

The delete this approach is imperative though. If you aim to be declarative you need a way for the tool to be able to determine actions necessary to go from current to new desired configuration. You need to store previous applied config somewhere, to be able to determine if something needs purging in a declarative way.

[GeneralMayhem → pst]

You don't need to store the full old configuration anywhere other than as part of the current configuration. All you need is a list of IDs that existed in previous configurations. Something like:

  current_tables {
    TableA {
      Column1[string]
      Column2[bool]
    }
  }
  removed_tables: ["TableOld", "AnotherOldTable", ...]

Depending on your ergonomic preferences, you could also accomplish that by keeping the old table configs and adding an "is_deleted" flag. And once you've done one deploy, you can delete all the old tombstoned configs.

[jvitor03 → GeneralMayhem]

Looks like you are creating based on puppet or ansible, not Terraform :)

The whole idea of TF is to not have to declare an absent resource for it to be destroyed, because the declarative approach already have the desired state.

[jen20 → GeneralMayhem]

That is a state file by any other name. Terraform could work this way with fairly trivial code changes, and the cost of blowing up provider rate limits during fast incremental development (the kind of places where you set -refresh=false).

[pst → GeneralMayhem]

Yes, but setting up and handling edge cases of Terraform state causes the effort. Once you have it, storing just IDs or more doesn't make a difference anymore.

[silverlyra → pst]

It sounds to me more like Puppet's "ensure absent"; still declarative in the sense that you can keep it around and it will continue to clean up any zombie instances that recur.

And this is only during incremental adoption, where you'd soft-delete resources in your config by switching them to tombstones instead of removing them entirely, and adding tombstones for legacy unmanaged resources you want to remove (which builds up a nice history of those removals).

Once that's done, switch to "omnipresent" mode, delete all the tombstones, and never worry about them or state again.

[pst → silverlyra]

Keeping the tombstones around in the configuration I have to maintain instead of the state the tool maintains for me also increases the effort for me though. So either I have the effort of setting up the remote state and handling some edge cases. Or handling the shortcomings of stateless in my own code base.