{"slug": "show-hn-intent-based-infrastructure-on-top-of-terraform", "title": "Show HN: Intent Based Infrastructure on Top of Terraform", "summary": "A developer launched a platform on Hacker News that layers high-level intent constructs on top of Terraform, letting users declare a model graph of nodes such as App, Region, Environment, Service, and Server instead of writing low-level cloud resources. The platform's Octo library converts those intent nodes into actual cloud resources — for example, a Region node into a VPC plus internet gateway, or an Environment into an ECS Cluster — and generates the corresponding Terraform code for users to run normally. The developer is seeking collaborators and feedback on the project, which has 1 point and 0 comments on Hacker News.", "body_md": "Hey everyone! I built a platform that works on top of Terraform to expose high level constructs you want to create in your infrastructure (intent) rather than actually dealing with cloud resources (typical terraform modules).\n\nI am looking for other enthusiasts to work on this project, and gather feedback.\n\nThe problem I am trying to solve is complexity. Typically you make infra by either asking AI, or dealing with very low level resources that other people on your team might not fully understand. If you expose a higher level construct, people will only typically deal with a well understood graph of intent which is much easier to understand and reason about, without worrying about low level resources.\n\nIt works by declaring a model graph that consists of simple nodes like App, Region, Environment, Service, Server, etc that you show your intent with. E.g. My infrastructure consists of 3 AWS accounts (QA, Staging, Prod), with 2 Regions in each, and 1 Environment, under which my Service X resides.\n\nThe Octo library then converts those intent to actual cloud resources using your instructions. E.g. it would convert a Region node into a vpc + internet-gateway. Or an Environment into an ECS Cluster.\n\nIt will also generate the Terraform code for each of these cloud resources that your intent wanted. You can then run this Terraform code normally and get your infrastructure.\n\nThere is a lot more depth, features, and roadmap items to this. Happy to go in more detail.\n\nComments URL: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49740408](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49740408)\n\nPoints: 1\n\n# Comments: 0", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-intent-based-infrastructure-on-top-of-terraform", "canonical_source": "https://octo.quadnix.com/", "published_at": "2026-09-17 13:23:06+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-09-17 13:26:32.374622+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-infrastructure", "developer-tools"], "entities": ["Terraform", "Octo", "Hacker News", "AWS", "ECS"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-intent-based-infrastructure-on-top-of-terraform", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-intent-based-infrastructure-on-top-of-terraform.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-intent-based-infrastructure-on-top-of-terraform.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-intent-based-infrastructure-on-top-of-terraform.jsonld"}}