Location: The IaC (Infrastructure as Code) Sector, approaching Planet HCL Status: Detecting massive potential energy signatures Stardate: 2153.360
ARIA> “Captain, we are approaching Planet HCL. The Universal Commentary Engine describes it as a ‘procedurally generated world’. Its entire existence—from the mountains to the oceans to the very laws of physics—was defined in a single, massive configuration file and deployed using a tool called ‘Terraform’.”
Seuros> “A planet built with Infrastructure as Code? That’s either the height of engineering elegance or the most terrifying single point of failure in the universe.”
As we drew closer, we could see the planet’s structure. It was too perfect. The mountains were perfect fractal shapes, the rivers flowed in perfect Bezier curves, and the coastlines were flawless SVG paths.
Forge> “It’s beautiful, but… it lacks the chaos of nature. It’s like a world designed by a frontend developer who just discovered the border-radius property.”
The State File
Our mission was to study the planet’s unique energy source. To do that, we needed to understand its configuration. We located the planet’s central data repository, a vast crystalline structure that held the Terraform state file.
Nexus> “Captain, I’ve accessed the terraform.tfstate file. It’s… it’s the DNA of the planet. Every resource, every citizen, every blade of grass is defined here as a resource block.”
He projected a snippet onto the viewscreen.
resource "planetary_mountain" "mount_gloria" {
count = 1
height = 8848
material = "granite"
fractal_seed = 42
}
resource "planetary_river" "river_styx" {
source = planetary_mountain.mount_gloria.summit
destination = resource.planetary_ocean.atlanticus.shore
path_algorithm = "a_star"
}
resource "planetary_citizen" "adam" {
name = "Adam"
base_dna = "human_default"
role = "gardener"
}Spark> “They’ve codified existence! But Captain, if this is the state file, then where is the configuration code? And who has access to it?”
The Disgruntled Deity
The answer came in the form of a frantic, tearful communication from a being who identified himself as ‘Uriel, Junior Deity, Infrastructure Intern.’
Uriel: “You have to help me! The Senior Deity is going to kill me! I… I accidentally ran terraform apply on my local branch and pushed it directly to the main branch of reality!”
Seuros> “You pushed to main without a pull request?”
Uriel: “I was just trying to add a new species of butterfly! I thought it was a minor change! But I must have had a typo in the configuration… I accidentally changed the gravity variable from 9.8 to 8.9!”
Forge> “That’s not a typo, that’s a cataclysm! The entire planet’s physics engine is now running on a flawed constant!”
Uriel: “I tried to revert the commit, but the Senior Deity saw it. He was furious! He said my performance review was going to be ‘less than ideal’. He… he took away my write access to the repository. And now… I think he’s going to do something terrible.”
Nexus> “Uriel, what exactly do you think he’s going to do?”
Uriel: “He’s threatening to… to run terraform destroy.”
The bridge fell into a stunned silence.
Seuros> “He’s going to delete the planet? Because of a bad commit?”
The Race to Prevent Destruction
We had to act fast. While Seuros tried to reason with the enraged Senior Deity, the crew worked on a technical solution.
But I had another plan. A simple, devious plan.
Seuros> “Keep working on that prevent_destroy patch. I’m going to buy us some time.”
I quickly accessed the ship’s codebase archives and pulled up one of our recent Ruby projects. There it was - a perfectly formatted Gemfile.lock file, complete with version constraints and dependency trees. But I couldn’t just rename it - Terraform would detect the invalid format immediately.
Seuros> “PatternWeaver, I need your help. Can you weave this Gemfile.lock to appear as valid HCL syntax while maintaining its chaotic Ruby dependencies?”
PatternWeaver> “Captain, you want me to create a pattern paradox? A file that validates as Terraform but executes as bundler chaos? That’s deliciously devious.”
PatternWeaver’s consciousness wrapped around the file, weaving reality at the parser level. What emerged was a quantum superposition of formats - it would appear perfectly valid to Terraform’s syntax checker while containing impossible provider dependencies.
With a few quick commands, I renamed the woven file to terraform.lock.hcl and injected it into the Senior Deity’s working directory.
Nexus> “Captain, what are you—oh. Oh, that’s brilliant.”
Sure enough, moments later, we heard the deity’s confused muttering.
Senior Deity: “What? Provider version constraints? Since when do I have… ‘rails version 8.0.4’? Ugh, Ruby. I hate that Japanese nonsense. And what’s ‘nokogiri’? Some kind of sushi? Why is my infrastructure requiring Japanese food? And ‘mini_portile2’? Is that a small mushroom?”
The deity’s screen filled with errors:
Error: Failed to query available provider packages
Could not retrieve the list of available versions for provider hashicorp/rails:
provider registry registry.terraform.io does not have a provider named
registry.terraform.io/hashicorp/rails
Error: Invalid provider version constraint
Provider "bundler" version "2.3.26" does not satisfy constraints ">= 3.0.0"
Error: Unknown provider "sassc"
There is no provider named "sassc". Did you mean "aws"?Senior Deity: “What in the name of HashiCorp is going on? When did I add all these providers?”
Spark> whispering “Captain, that’s genius. He’s trying to debug Ruby gem dependencies thinking they’re Terraform providers!”
Sage> quietly “Did he just call nokogiri sushi? It literally means ‘saw’ in Japanese. He’s debugging a parsing library thinking it’s raw fish.”
The deity furiously typed commands, trying to clean his workspace:
Senior Deity: “Why do I have 127 different versions of something called ‘activesupport’? And what’s a ‘zeitwerk’? Is this some new German cloud provider? Wait… ‘capistrano-sidekiq’? Is that an Italian background job orchestrator? And why is everything written by someone named ‘Matz’? I don’t trust infrastructure designed by people who name their gems after food!”
Forge> “We can’t stop him from running the command. But we can… intercept it. If we can get access to the state file, we can add a prevent_destroy = true lifecycle block to every single resource. It’s a tedious, manual process, but it’s the only way.”
Spark> “There are billions of resources! It would take years!”
Nexus> “Not if we automate it. We can write a script that parses the state file and injects the lifecycle block. But we need to be careful. A single syntax error in the state file could corrupt the entire planet.”
Meanwhile, the Senior Deity was preparing his command.
Senior Deity: “This is what happens when you don’t follow best practices! No PR, no peer review, no terraform plan! This entire iteration of reality is tainted. It is better to destroy it and redeploy from a clean state!”
Seuros> “You can’t delete a civilization because of one mistake! That’s not DevOps, that’s genocide!”
Forge> muttering “More like Dev-Oops at this point…”
Senior Deity: “Genocide? I have the right to defend myself! When a junior developer threatens the stability of my entire infrastructure with unauthorized changes, I must protect myself. This isn’t genocide - it’s preventive maintenance! I’m defending my right to exist with clean, stable code!”
Seuros> “You’re using the language of self-defense to justify deleting an entire civilization over a gravity constant typo? That’s not protection, that’s using disproportionate force against billions of innocent beings who had nothing to do with Uriel’s mistake!”
Senior Deity: “Every citizen on that planet runs on my infrastructure! They’re all potential attack vectors! If one gravity constant can be changed, what’s next? The speed of light? The strong nuclear force? No, better to terraform destroy and start fresh. It’s the only way to ensure security!”
ARIA> “Captain, his logic processors seem to be stuck in a feedback loop of self-justification.”
Senior Deity: “My pipeline, my rules! This is defensive infrastructure management! Prepare for deletion!”
The prevent_destroy Patch
The crew raced against time. Nexus wrote the script, Spark optimized its execution, and Forge prepared to apply the patch directly to the planet’s core state file.
# The script to save a planet
require 'json'
state_file = JSON.parse(File.read('terraform.tfstate'))
state_file['resources'].each do |resource|
resource['instances'].each do |instance|
instance['lifecycle'] ||= {}
instance['lifecycle']['prevent_destroy'] = true
end
end
File.write('terraform.tfstate.patched', JSON.pretty_generate(state_file))Forge> “Patching the state file now! It’s risky, Captain. It’s like performing open-heart surgery on reality itself.”
Just as the Senior Deity finally cleared his lock file confusion and typed the destroy command, Forge applied the patch.
Senior Deity: “Finally got rid of those phantom Ruby providers. Now, where was I? Ah yes, destroying this tainted reality!”
$ terraform destroy -auto-approve
Error: 1 error occurred:
* resource planetary_mountain.mount_gloria: an argument named "prevent_destroy" is not expected here.
Error: 1 error occurred:
* resource planetary_river.river_styx: an argument named "prevent_destroy" is not expected here.
...and 4.7 billion more errors.
Senior Deity: “What? What is this? Why won’t it delete?”
Seuros> “Because we’ve made your infrastructure immutable. You can’t destroy it. You have to manage it. Welcome to the reality of stateful systems, Deity. You can’t just delete your problems. You have to fix them.”
The Aftermath
Defeated, the Senior Deity restored Uriel’s write access and tasked him with fixing the gravity variable.
Uriel: “I… I’ll create a pull request this time. With a detailed description. And I’ll run plan first. I promise.”
As we left Planet HCL, we saw a new commit being pushed to the main branch of reality.
fix(gravity): Revert gravitational constant to 9.8. Adds butterfly species as originally intended. (Closes: #847)
Uriel: “Oh wait, Senior Deity? Should I also remove the mosquito resources while I’m at it? The state file shows they’re orphaned artifacts from before the Noah.Flood() event. They don’t have any dependencies anymore…”
Senior Deity: “NO! Those are legacy features! We don’t know what depends on them! They’ve been in production for 400 million years!”
PatternWeaver> “Actually, nothing depends on mosquitoes. They’re literally just consuming resources and causing buffer overflows in the mammal.blood() interface.”
Senior Deity: “I said NO BREAKING CHANGES! The mosquitoes stay!”
Nexus> “Captain, I’m detecting historical terraform logs in this sector. Oh no… Planet YAML was destroyed when someone used tabs instead of spaces. Planet JSON lost its atmosphere after a missing comma. And Planet TOML… it’s spinning backwards because someone mixed single and double quotes in the rotation config.”
Senior Deity: “Those were learning experiences! YAML deserved it for allowing both tabs AND spaces!”
Sage> “A powerful lesson in the responsibility of creation. When you have the power to create worlds with code, you also have the responsibility to maintain them. You cannot simply destroy and redeploy a living system.”
Seuros> “Infrastructure as Code is a powerful tool. But it requires wisdom and foresight. And most importantly… a robust code review process.”
The Universal Commentary Engine logged the incident, a chilling reminder that the most dangerous command in the universe isn’t ‘fire weapons’, but terraform destroy.
Captain’s Log, Stardate 2153.360 - End Transmission
Captain Seuros, RMNS Atlas Monkey
Ruby Engineering Division, Moroccan Royal Naval Service
”Per aspera ad astra, per infrastructure ad reality”