Infrastructure is the Source of Truth - by Mark Ellens

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Infrastructure is the Source of Truth<br>Stop Marrying Your Infrastructure Tools

Mark Ellens<br>Jun 18, 2026

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For years, one of the central tenets of DevOps has been the rejection of clickops. For good reason. Manual changes are hard to audit, difficult to reproduce and almost impossible to scale.<br>The industry responded by pushing everything into code, and that was largely the right move. The problem is that somewhere along the way we stopped treating Infrastructure as Code as a useful representation of reality and started treating it as reality itself. Fear of clickops became so deeply embedded in our thinking that we assumed the only trustworthy view of a system was the one expressed in Terraform, CloudFormation or CDK. In solving one problem, we may have accidentally created another: coupling our understanding of infrastructure to the tooling used to describe it.<br>There is a better approach: instead of treating Terraform or CDK as the master copy, treat them as generated views of a shared model of reality. The infrastructure exists first. The tool-specific representation comes second. Terraform becomes one way of describing the system rather than the system itself.<br>I just wrote a PoC Swamp extension called swampMigrate. Underneath it sits Swamp, which continuously observes and models what’s actually running. In many ways, it embraces the original intent behind Infrastructure as Code - capturing infrastructure in a reproducible, versioned, and auditable form - without requiring any particular IaC tool to serve as the permanent source of truth. From that model it’s straightforward to generate DSLs and definitions for Terraform, CDK, OpenTofu or whatever comes next. The model stays constant; only the representation changes.<br>That distinction matters because it gives you a way out. Most migration projects exist because organisations have tied themselves to a particular representation of their infrastructure. If the source of truth is the infrastructure itself, then switching tools becomes far less dramatic. You’re not translating Terraform into CDK or CDK into OpenTofu. You’re generating a different view of the same underlying system. What’s funny is that earlier today Paul Stack from Swamp published an article about how infra is not the only use case for Swamp.<br>The irony is that most organisations will never switch Infrastructure as Code tools. That’s not really the point. The value comes from knowing that you can. The moment a tool becomes easy to leave, you stop making decisions out of inertia and start making them on merit.<br>We’ve spent years debating which Infrastructure-as-Code tool should serve as our source of truth. Maybe infrastructure itself should be the source of truth, and everything else is just another view of it.

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