Ideally you implement a middle ground of declarative (but not necessarily immutable) infrastructure where changes are diffed. Terraform does this pretty nicely.

I hear what you're saying, but we've got elastic search in Terraform as a module, and you dare not make mods to an existing cluster; Terraform will dutifully tear that cluster down depending on the changes you make (I mean, sure, use a "plan" first, but still).

Yea, unfortunately Terraform often insists on a full teardown when it would be possible to make an incremental update.

Agree, Terraform is awesome and we love it (https://blog.elasticbyte.net/getting-started-with-terraform-...). Howerver sometimes changes that should patch, instead result in destroying and re-creating instances which can be scary.

Quit using terraform as a complete monolith and modularize it.

See the title "getting started..."