Back in July of last year Hashicorp announced the preview of Terraform 0.12. As of yesterday (May 22nd) 0.12 is now in generally availability. Some of the highlights I am looking forward to are (but not limited to):

• Incompatibilities and Notes
  • -var and -var-file correspond to declared variables, generating errors or warnings if not.
• New Features
  • First-class expressions: ami ="${var.foo}" -> ami = var.ami
  • The for express
  • Generalized "splat" operator
  • Nullable argument values
  • Revamped error messages
  • Generalized Type System
  • Structural Rendering of Plans
• Other Improvements
  • formatedate function ( ... still waiting for Unix timestamp support. #Hashicorp ...)
  • A new pg state storage backend allows storing state in a PostgreSQL database.
• Bug Fixes
  • ...a lot of fixes.

All in all it looks like 0.12 shaped up to be a nice point release. I am looking forward to seeing how these improvements will help me bend "the cloud" the my will

Stay tuned for a follow up when I explore how hard the migration from 0.11.x to 0.12.0 ends up being for a couple of current projects.

Additional Reading

• https://blog.davidjeddy.com/2018/07/11/terraform-0-12-preview-from-hashicorp
• https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/announcing-terraform-0-12
• https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/blob/v0.12.0/CHANGELOG.md