terraform plan -light

[ricardbejarano]

Terraform Version

Terraform v1.8.4
on darwin_amd64

Use Cases

Fixing plan (or rather, refresh) performance on large enough (in resource count) states.

Attempted Solutions

• Increasing parallelism only takes you so far until the providers rate-limit you.
• Disabling refresh works but comes with all sorts of consistency risks.
• Splitting one big state into multiple smaller states comes with all sorts of problems associated with it.

Proposal

Add a terraform plan -light flag such that only resources modified in code are targeted for planning.

This would reduce the scope of the pre-plan refresh down to the set of resources we know changed, which reduces overall plan times without the consistency risk of -refresh=false.

In order for Terraform to know what resources were modified in code, it would store a copy of the code in state every time it successfully applies. This would allow diff'ing "last-applied code" vs. "new code", the result of which is the scope of the next "light" plan.

Basically, -light tells Terraform to autogenerate the -target list from code changes.

More details: https://www.bejarano.io/terraform-plan-light/

References

No response

[crw]

Thanks for this feature request! If you are viewing this issue and would like to indicate your interest, please use the 👍 reaction on the issue description to upvote this issue. We also welcome additional use case descriptions. Thanks again!

[Tbohunek]

THIS IS BIG! 🔝🚀🔥 Thanks @ricardbejarano!

Make Terraform faster and save CO2? Every Terraform user wants this, whether they know it or not. And I'll do all I can to propagate this idea across my organization and to anyone I bump into, including my mom, who now has a GitHub account! :octocat:

Adding the benefits that I see:

• Reduce concurrency clashes Other plans cause locks, queues, or API depletion; other applies cause me to have to replan again.
• Reduce the likelihood of external changes breaking your change _Unrelated data.azuread_user fails the whole plan because the user no longer exists._
• Reduce the likelihood of unrelated API problems breaking your change _Just a week ago, the azurerm_security_center_contact API was down, making TFE apply impossible._
• Reduce Provider API limits exhaustion, especially in hub and spoke topologies azurerm and google providers often time out reads with API limits of ~25 reads/sec.
• Reduce CO2 emissions and compute resource waste Eating beef is being denounced while Terraform literally wastes CO2 and energy with pointless reads.
• Make VCS-driven TFE workflow feasible again VCS-driven TFE workflow cannot apply -target=what.you.want to circumvent the above issues.

If this gets implemented, every single TFE user will be grateful, knowingly or unknowingly. When released, make them aware through a tooltip with credits. 😉