No More Terraform Monoliths! Introducing Snap CD

What interests me about infrastructure work is composition — whether your setup is a rigid, unyielding bureaucracy, or a pile of goo spreading in every direction. Usually it's both at once. What I want is to be able to deliberately compose something that stays controlled, but open to extension, without collapsing under its own weight. This video is where I introduce Snap CD and why I built it. I start with what tools like Terraform and OpenTofu do well, then walk through where the whole plan-and-apply cycle starts to break down as a project grows — bootstrapping, the blast radius of a single change, and drift you can't judge — and why breaking a monolith into smaller, interdependent pieces is harder than it sounds. Then I lay out the seven goals I had for a better tool: 1. Compose infrastructure as self-contained modules — as code 2. Changes that propagate automatically 3. Isolated Runners, so only they touch your cloud credentials 4. Granular, role-based permissions 5. Non-invasive execution — the Runners run pure Terraform, no wrapper 6. An extensive supporting toolset 7. AI participation — with guardrails, not a free hand I finish with the architecture — the Server, the Runners, and the AI Agent — and a full live demo: from compose up to a deployed sample stack, watching jobs and logs, an approval, an AI mission, state stores, outputs shared between modules, an ordered teardown, and the RBAC and agent setup underneath it. Snap CD works with OpenTofu and is source-available, with a free community edition you can self-host. Links ▸ Source — https://github.com/schrieksoft/snapcd ▸ Home — https://snapcd.io ▸ Docs — https://docs.snapcd.io ▸ Quickstart — https://docs.snapcd.io/quickstart/ ▸ Provider — https://registry.terraform.io/provide... ▸ Sample — https://github.com/snapcd-samples/sam... Chapters: 0:00 Infrastructure composition 2:26 What Terraform does well 3:40 State cycle breakdowns 6:38 Why decomposing is hard 7:51 What I wanted from Snap CD: seven goals 13:22 The Snap CD architecture 14:13 Demo: quickstart guide 16:22 Demo: modules, namespaces, stacks 20:05 Demo: spinning it up 21:07 Demo: the dashboard 21:49 Demo: state stores 24:01 Demo: the sample, as code 26:35 Demo: jobs, logs, a mission & approvals 36:48 Demo: ordered teardown 39:05 Demo: more on the UI: the dashboard and starred items 39:51 Demo: more on the UI: IAM and RBAC 40:40 Demo: more on the UI: API reference 42:02 Demo: Supplying agents, runners, integrations and sate stores 43:50 Demo: Configuring module_input_from_output resources 47:55 Wrap-up