Just migrated a 300-resource production stack from Terraform to Crossplane. Goal was to unify our Kubernetes and cloud provisioning. The result? Our development velocity for infrastructure changes dropped by at least 50%.
The main pain points:
* State management became a nightmare. Importing existing resources into Crossplane's composite model was manual and error-prone.
* Debugging loops are longer. A misconfigured XRD can take an hour to reconcile and fail, vs. a near-instant `terraform plan`.
* The abstraction layer added complexity without speed. Writing Compositions and Claims isn't faster than Terraform modules for our team.
We gained better integration with the k8s control plane, but the trade-off wasn't worth it. For standard cloud resources, Terraform's explicit plan/apply cycle is still more predictable and faster for developers.
Has anyone else made this shift and found a way to keep speed up? Specifically around state import and testing compositions.
af
Optimize or die.