I Also understand this is far from perfect and I appreciate all your comments. I just wish AWS had something like localstack with all endpoints mocked would make everybody life so much better. Not to mention if they could use same(consistent) names for everything i.e API, CLI, BOTO etc...
In the end of the day is about COST but we could have more machines doing builds and better ones but still takes more time and effort them being local. Terraform enterprise is not available for me. Since my project just uses Open Source besides AWS.
AWS moves pretty FAST, but I don't know anything better than LocalStack fro AWS mocking.
All fare and reasonable points JBerlinsky! All you said make sense to me.
IMHO the main use cases for me is:
- Speed up development time by doing tests locally - don't need to commit and wait a build kick it and see whats wrong.
- Able to be part of the bigger scheme where you can test your whole "infrastructure" or part of it at least we still limited by localstack.
Yes, it's possible to test it is local if you have credentials. But for security reasons, lots of times companies don't provide credentials. Also, it's your local dev machine you don't want mess it up right? So docker is awesome being ephemeral.
Sometimes when you use PACKER and you have a SHARED infrastructure a build could take 40mim to run all the things with Terraform/Ansible that kind of a mainframe :D Unfortunately this exit :(