Mixed Data-Types and Keeping Things Clean

This year, one of the projects I've been assigned to has me assisting a customer in implementing a cloud-monitoring solution for their multi-cloud deployment. The tool uses the various CSPs APIs to monitor the creation/modification/deletion of resources and how those resources are configured.

The tool, itself, is primarily oriented for use and configuration via web UI. However, one can configure it via Terraform. This makes it easier to functionally-clone the monitoring tool's configuration as well a reconstitute it if someone blows it up.

That said, the tool uses Nunjucks and GraphQL to implement some of its rule-elements. Further, most of the data it handles comes in the form of JSON streams. The Nunjucks content, in particular, can be used to parse those JSON streams and static JSON content can be stored within the  monitoring-application. Because Terraform is used for CLI-based configuration, the Terraform resources can consist of pure Terraform code as well as a mix of encapsulated Nunjucks, GraphQL and JSON.

Most of the vendor's demonstration configuration-code has the Nunjucks, GraphQL and JSON contents wholly encapsulated in Terraform resource-definitions. If one wants to lint their configuration-code prior to pushing it into the application, the vendor-offered method for formatting the code can work counter to that. That said, with careful coding, one can separate the content-types from each other and use reference-directives to allow Terraform to do the work of merging it all together. While this may seem more complex, separating the content-types means that each chunk of content is more-easily validated and checked for errors. Rather than blindly hitting "terraform apply" and hoping for the best, you can lint your JSON, Nunjucks and GraphQL separately. This means that, once you've authored all of your initial code and wish to turn it over to someone else to do lifecycle tasks, you can horse it all to a CI workflow that ensures that humans that have edited any given file hasn't introduced content-type violations that can lead to ugly surprises.

Honestly, I have more confidence that the people I turn things over to will know how to massage single content-type files than mixed content-type files. This means I feel like I'm less likely to get confused help requests after I'm moved to another assignment.