Overview

Deform is a tool that allows migrating infrastructure management from terraform to crossplane. It does this based on the terraform state (rather than the HCL code).

The imported infrastructure can be directly managed by crossplane. Deform introduces an intermediate layer of resources imported "raw" in crossplane. This just means that the structure and naming of each resource parameters is replicated directly from terraform.

Prerequisites

1. Crossplane installed in your current kubernetes context,
2. Crossplane provider for your target cloud vendor installed and configured,
3. Basic tools installed:
   • kubectl
   • jq
   • helm
   • (optional) yaml2json - Only in case you need to generate extra translation configs (see below). But even then, if you don't have it, its functionality will be emulated with kubectl.
   • (optional) fzf - also only used for identifying additional translation configs.

Translation configurations

Please refer to OVERVIEW.md for explanation of the functional components of deform. At minimum, you need to understand that deform needs a set of translation configs to be able to translate terraform resources to their crossplane counterparts. Those configs come shipped with the project, but you can expect them to be incomplete. Fortunately, the deform project also provides tooling to assist in the generation of those - again, for the details, please refer to the OVERVIEW.md document.

Workflow

Preparation

1. Before you can use deform, you first need to pull the terraform state to a local file, in a standardized "show" format. You can do that in a single step like this:

terraform show -json > my_tf_module-tf-show.json

or by first saving the ftstate with terraform state pull > my.tfstate.json and then transforming it to the "show" format: terraform show -json my.tfstate.json > my_tf_module-tf-show.json. (At this point you can delete the intermediate my.tfstate.json.)

Once you have the my_tf_module-tf-show.json file, it is recommended to move it into the in directory, so that you can reference it easily while calling deform: mv /path/to/my/terraform/my_tf_module-tf-show.json in/

2. Also make sure you have the necessary translation configs for your PROVIDER, e.g.

ls -l aws/

If the project is missing some translations necessary in your use case, please refer to the OVERVIEW.md document to learn how you can generate those yourself. The tooling included with deform will aid you at this.

Main operation

1. Call deform to generate manifests from your terraform module:

./deform in/my_tf_module-tf-show.json

2. Inspect and then apply the generated manifests. This can be also done automatically in previous step, if you set AUTOAPPLY env variable to any value while invoking deform.

kubectl apply -f out/path_reported_by_deform_in_previous_step/xrds
# inspect...
kubectl apply -f out/path_reported_by_deform_in_previous_step/xrs
# inspect...
kubectl apply -f out/path_reported_by_deform_in_previous_step/compositions

Note: If you have configured your crossplane provider properly, the cloud resources you have imported with deform will now be controlled by the crossplane provider controller.

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Project maturity level and support

This project is currently in a Work In Progress state. Note that, even though it has been originally developed at Mendix Technology B.V., the company does not offer any support for it. Functionality described in the documentation has only been tested for a handful of use cases. There is also a TODO file included. All contributions are much appreciated! ❤️