Why not Terraform?

[allixsenos]

From the perspective of someone who isn't inherently a fan of Terraform, it seems to me that using Terraform for DNS is in the same category as "using Ansible to manage AWS infrastructure"... it's possible, but is it really a good solution? Off the bat, the advantages of dnscontrol:

1. You don't have an external state file, you have what's in the DNS and what's in the file.
2. The syntax is very digestible. Comparing terraform/providers/cloudflare/resources/record for example, and damn, 6-12 lines for a single DNS entry? From my previous job, the DNS file had over 400 entries for the main production domain, how much would that be in TF?
3. From the same example above, it seems to me that for a DNS record in Cloudflare you write a cloudflare_record type resource, and then when you want that in Route53 you need to change the type of record? Dnscontrol keeps that separate, and it's very easy to load a zone from something into something else. People often do that, it helped me for example to migrate an internal domain from Rackspace DNS (yuck) to Route53. Not only are such migrations often done but people often publish the same zone to multiple destinations for fallback... how would you publish the same zone to Cloudflare and Route53 with Terraform, for example?
4. Does Terraform give you a nice error like "apex can't be a CNAME" or does it crap its pants with a generic error from upstream so you have to dig around?
5. Dnscontrol can load an existing zone from a known provider into its own format, that's a pretty powerful feature.

At my old job, we had an application stack that would create a DNS record for the application so that it was available at appname.dev.internal.domain, that to me is a totally valid use case for TF or whatever you're using for IaC, because it's part of the app stack... my solution is more for things that you would maintain "manually" regardless. And for various, for example, "parked" domains which are a pain in the ass when you start to maintain a hundred of them.

Very interested to hear thoughts on this.