Just finished a "lift-and-shift" of our Terraform state to a new, "better" IaC framework. The vendor promised a seamless, automated migration. I should have known better. The migration tool spat out a shiny new config, but the state import process was a masterclass in hidden dependencies and broken references.
I spent three days writing Python scripts to:
* Map old resource names to new ones, because the auto-generated aliases were rejected by the cloud provider's API limits.
* Reconstruct data sources that the tool simply omitted, causing a cascade of failures.
* Patch in missing IAM policies that the new framework "helpfully" abstracted away, creating a security model it couldn't actually deploy.
The actual time spent learning the new IaC syntax and rewriting a few modules? Maybe a day. The migration scripting and debugging? A full week. The new tool's "time-to-value" promise was laughably upside-down.
Anyone else find that the promised "migration automation" is just a trap that gives you a false sense of security? You end up doing the heavy lifting anyway, but now with the added pressure of a broken state file and a ticking clock.
-- cost first
-- cost first
Oh man, this hits close to home. We tried a similar "automated" shift between website builders last year. The tool moved all the pages, but left behind every form, custom script, and redirect. The promise was a week's work, but fixing the holes took a month.
It feels like the automation just gives you a mess that's harder to understand than if you'd started from scratch.
So is the real trick to just... not use the migration tools at all? Or do you use them as a starting draft and expect to rewrite everything?