OSS + ELC EU 2026

Most IaC tools, Terraform chief among them, keep a local copy of state to plan changes, detect drift, and resolve references. That state file is also a known source of pain: it can go stale, get corrupted, and become a coordination bottleneck.

What happens when an IaC system deliberately keeps no local state? Instead of a stored snapshot, every operation reconciles desired configuration against live state at apply time. That single choice shapes everything else, and not all of it is smooth sailing.

Drawing on her experience building widely adopted open-source declarative CLIs, Prashansa unpacks the lessons she learned. The talk covers the tradeoffs statelessness forces: full-state sync versus additive configuration and when each fits, resolving references without a stored dependency graph, schema-aware diffing, and transparent reconciliation so users see what a tool does. It also covers production challenges: compatibility across platform versions, evolving schemas, and keeping behaviour predictable as systems grow.
Attendees will leave understanding why most IaC tools rely on state, what gets simpler and harder without it, and how to weigh these tradeoffs in their own systems.