Just read Brikman's Terraform book and it was great! He's a clear writer and great explainer and I'd recommend it to anyone looking for a good resource to get started with infrastructure-as-code.

The obvious counterpoint is that then you'd have to rewrite every single tool in every language people used.

I don't care about extending most of my tooling, I just want it to work. I'm not going to spend years rewriting Terraform in Rust just because I don't use Go in my company.

Overall I'd say the best book about microservices is Chris Richardson's Microservices Patterns (https://www.manning.com/books/microservices-patterns). That book will get you covered with everything you need to know about designing and building microservices, and also the various strategies you can use to integrate them. The examples are in Java, but even without being a Java dev it shouldn't be difficult to follow.

I'd still recommend Sam Newman's classic Building Microservices (https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/building-microservices/...) as it describes very clearly the main principles for designing robust microservices architectures. If you wanted to learn how to migrate a monolith to a microservices architecture, you can also checkout Newman's more recent Monolith to Microservices (https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/monolith-to-microservic...).

If you want a more practical approach with JavaScript examples, I'd recommend Ashley Davis' Bootstrapping Microservices with Docker, Kubernetes, and Terraform (https://www.manning.com/books/bootstrapping-microservices-wi...).

Finally, if you wanted a practical approach with more emphasis on API integrations and examples in Python, I'd recommend Microservices APIs in Python (https://www.manning.com/books/developing-microservice-apis-w... - disclosure - I'm the author). You can download two free chapters from this URL: https://www.microapis.io/resources/microservice-apis-in-pyth...

It goes without saying that there're a lot more resources about microservices, and many of them excellent, but these are the books I'd recommend to get started.

> The last project I was on, I took time to write Terraform to deploy to AWS Elastic Beanstalk where I ran Docker containers. It took me two days to get all of that setup, and I consider that time to have been poorly utilized.

To be fair, you don't need that whole stack to run containers, and most of the work you had to do was to operate a particular choice of infrastructure services and tooling that are not necessary to run containers.

All you need to run containers in a single-node setup is Docker, and that's it.

Speed. I’m working on a new personal project. The last project I was on, I took time to write Terraform to deploy to AWS Elastic Beanstalk where I ran Docker containers. It took me two days to get all of that setup, and I consider that time to have been poorly utilized.

Yes, I can use Docker and deploy to my own server, but I really want to focus on the product/service being built, not infrastructure. I’m using Heroku now because it is free (for the moment), and setup is relatively quick. I just added Redis and Celery last night. That was mostly a matter of clicking to add the add-on, and updating some Django settings.

If the project takes off, and makes some money, maybe I’ll move to a different provider. At this stage, however, the costs outweigh the benefits.

Great write up, thanks!

I hadn't heard of Terraform before, so thanks for the introduction. I have recently been attempting to familiarize myself better with systems infrastructure, and it looks interesting. I'll have to do some reading on it.

I have a question. You mentioned that Whimsical's back-end, "mostly serves as a lightweight layer between the client and the data store." Does this mean that you do most of the data munging client side so that once it arrives server side, most of the work is already done? And if so, what do the trade-offs look like in such a scenario? If I'm understanding correctly, this means the client is fatter, but there's less load on the server, meaning cheaper infrastructure costs. Is this a correct way of looking at it?

I'm just a junior dev trying to gain a better understanding of large systems, so forgive me for any ignorance or misunderstanding.