Terraform 0.12 General Release

Back in July of last year Hashicorp announced the preview of Terraform 0.12. As of yesterday (May 22nd) 0.12 is now in generally availability. Some of the highlights I am looking forward to are (but not limited to):

• Incompatibilities and Notes
  • -var and -var-file correspond to declared variables, generating errors or warnings if not.
• New Features
  • First-class expressions: ami =”${var.foo}” -> ami = var.ami
  • The for express
  • Generalized “splat” operator
  • Nullable argument values
  • Revamped error messages
  • Generalized Type System
  • Structural Rendering of Plans
• Other Improvements
  • formatedate function ( … still waiting for Unix timestamp support. #Hashicorp …)
  • A new pg state storage backend allows storing state in a PostgreSQL database.
• Bug Fixes
  • …a lot of fixes.

All in all it looks like 0.12 shaped up to be a nice point release. I am looking forward to seeing how these improvements will help me bend “the cloud” the my will

Stay tuned for a follow up when I explore how hard the migration from 0.11.x to 0.12.0 ends up being for a couple of current projects.

Additional Reading

• https://blog.davidjeddy.com/2018/07/11/terraform-0-12-preview-from-hashicorp
• https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/announcing-terraform-0-12
• https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/blob/v0.12.0/CHANGELOG.md