GoKawiilEarlier this month, Dax Raad (@thdxr) posted something that resonated with a lot of developers:
"idk how people manage infrastructure anymore. every service has their own bespoke cli / config file and they don't support terraform well anymore. your system is never just one provider so do people just have a mess of these smashed together?"
Within a day, over fifty thousand people saw it. The replies poured in. SST. Pulumi. Ansible. "Just stay on AWS." "Python scripts that make REST calls." "It's job security." "Infrastructure today is duct tape wearing a dashboard."
Everyone recognized the problem. But the solutions were all tools, not foundations. I've been building something to address this, and seeing fifty thousand developers feel the same frustration confirmed I wasn't imagining it. Lock-in is a symptom, fragmentation is the disease, and programming languages solved the underlying problem decades ago.
I started thinking about vendor lock-in
The original frustration was familiar. You build on one provider, they change pricing, deprecate an API, or just aren't the right tool anymore, and migrating is brutal. Not because the concepts are hard, but because every provider speaks a different language.
The obvious answer seems like abstraction. Build a layer on top. That's what Terraform tried to do, and SST, and a dozen other tools.
But abstraction layers don't actually solve the problem, they just move it. You're still dependent on someone else to keep up with every provider. You're still waiting for the plugin to be written. You're still one licensing change away from being back where you started.
The root cause
@Zenul_Abidin nailed the trajectory: "Abstractions are breaking down. Terraform worked when providers were predictable, now every service ships its own opinionated layer." And @aalachimo connected it to incentives: "The shift away from Terraform support says more about vendors optimizing for lock-in than about infrastructure evolving."
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