HashiCorp tweaks Terraform with user interface changes and AI infused testing
The Register – Richard Speed
HASHICONF A host of Terraform features join HashiCorp’s flagship product today, including testing and user interface tweaks aimed at cutting errors in infrastructure code.

Terraform’s recent license shenanigans, which have enraged significant chunks of the open-source community and given rise to OpenTofu, have also served to add controversy to that driest of technologies – infrastructure as code.

To redress the balance, HashiCorp has shown off features – some generally available and some in beta or private preview – to make the Terraform experience smoother.

Most notable are the improvements around module testing.
Modules are a core component of Terraform and used by customers to standardize infrastructure provisioning.
However, by their very nature, a bug in a module’s code can cause mayhem, from outages to security holes.

A test framework showed up in Terraform 1.6 and is now directly integrated with the private registry, with a branch-based publishing method used to control how and when modules are published – a move away from the current Git tag-based publishing.
Even Terraform seems not immune to the latest and greatest fad in IT.
In this beta instance, generative AI is being implemented to kickstart the writing of module tests.
However, HashiCorp reckons the results are intended as a starting point for module authors.

The company said: “Our new generated module tests feature leverages a large language model (LLM) to auto-generate a suite of customized tests for a module within the private registry.
Link: https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/11/hashicorp_tweaks_terraform_with_user/