Why TFx?

If you are asking why does this CLI exist, read on...

As a consumer of Terraform Cloud or Terraform Enterprise I want to leverage the full capabilities without having to write curl/python/(insert other) libraries to call the API.

Often times these tasks are part of a delivery pipeline, but could also be administrative tasks that are done from a local machine. The goal of this tool is to allow users to interact with the platform easily without having to create a lot of code to maintain.

Common API-Driven Workflow Challenges:

The initial use case for tfx was to bridge the gap from the CLI-Workflow and the API-Driven Workflow.

• The CLI-Driven workflow presents several challenges when creating more advanced pipelines for a Workspace run, specifically the inability to insert a gate check between a plan and apply, (in other words you must run a terraform apply -auto-approve).
• The CLI driven workflow requires a terraform init that forces a download of providers before a plan can be called remotely, these providers are never actually used on the local host and can be difficult to source airgapped environments.
• Implementing an API-Driven workflow requires several API calls to perform a plan/apply.
• It is unlikely that the full range of features will be built into Terraform.
• Developing CI/CD specific plugins for even the most common tools is not feasible, and ignores the ability to run the commands locally.