TellIaC: Describe Cloud Infrastructure in Natural Language, Export Terraform Code with One Click

When Infrastructure as Code Meets Natural Language

For many developers and operations engineers, writing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is both important and tedious. Whether it's Terraform's HCL syntax or the unique resource definition approaches of various cloud providers, there's a significant learning curve involved. The open-source tool TellIaC (Human Infrastructure as Code) aims to change this — letting you describe the cloud resources you want in plain English sentences, with the tool automatically handling the conversion from requirements to infrastructure code.

Its tagline says it all: "Plain English IaC engine with 1-click Terraform export." The project was built by developer Harshal Jethwa and has gained attention in the Open Source and Developer Tools categories on Product Hunt.

The Evolution of IaC: From Manual Operations to Declarative Code

Infrastructure as Code is a practice of managing and provisioning computing infrastructure through declarative or imperative code, originating from the rise of the DevOps movement in the mid-2000s. Before IaC, operations staff had to manually log into servers to configure them — a process that was not only time-consuming and error-prone but also difficult to reproduce. Terraform was released by HashiCorp in 2014, and its HCL (HashiCorp Configuration Language) is a declarative language that sits between JSON and traditional programming languages, supporting hundreds of cloud services and SaaS platforms through its Provider plugin mechanism. Besides Terraform, other mainstream IaC tools include AWS CloudFormation, Pulumi, Ansible, and more — each with different strengths but all adhering to the core principle of "code as the single source of truth."

TellIaC attempts to take the next step on this evolutionary path — introducing natural language into the IaC workflow and further lowering the barrier to describing infrastructure.

Core Capabilities: From a Single Sentence to Multi-Cloud Deployment

TellIaC's core philosophy is to use "human language" as the primary entry point for infrastructure description. You simply describe your requirements as you would write a sentence, and it handles resource planning and configuration across major cloud platforms.

This approach builds on the rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) in code generation capabilities in recent years. Tools like GitHub Copilot and Amazon CodeWhisperer have already demonstrated that AI can transform vague natural language intent into structured code. TellIaC extends this capability to the infrastructure domain, essentially building a bridge between LLM code generation capabilities and IaC's declarative paradigm. The core challenge of this approach is that infrastructure configuration demands far greater precision than ordinary code — an incorrect security group rule could lead to a data breach, and a wrong instance specification could result in an enormous bill.

Coverage Across Major Cloud and Container Platforms

According to official documentation, TellIaC supports resource provisioning across the following environments:

• AWS (Amazon Web Services)
• Azure (Microsoft Cloud)
• GCP (Google Cloud Platform)
• Kubernetes (Container Orchestration Platform)

This unified entry point for multi-cloud and container environments means teams don't need to switch syntax and mental models for different platforms, effectively reducing the complexity of cross-cloud management.

According to Flexera's 2024 State of the Cloud Report, over 87% of enterprises adopt multi-cloud strategies, using an average of 2.6 public cloud platforms. The core pain point of multi-cloud environments is that each cloud provider has its own unique resource naming system, API style, and configuration paradigm — AWS's EC2 corresponds to Azure's Virtual Machine and GCP's Compute Instance, each with different networking, storage, and IAM models. Terraform partially solves this through its unified HCL syntax and Provider abstraction layer, but operators still need to understand each platform's resource attributes and limitations. TellIaC attempts to add another layer of abstraction on top of Terraform, allowing users to not even worry about the specific parameter names of underlying resources.

Four Supporting Features to Enhance the IaC Workflow

Beyond the core natural-language-to-infrastructure conversion, TellIaC includes a complete set of supporting capabilities around the IaC lifecycle:

1. HCL Export: One-click export of generated infrastructure definitions to standard Terraform HCL code, making it easy to integrate into existing workflows and version control.
2. Cost Estimation: Estimate resource costs before actual deployment, helping teams assess budgets in advance and avoid billing surprises.
3. Security Scanning: Perform security checks on generated configurations to identify potential configuration risks early.
4. Graph Visualization: Present resource dependencies as visual graphs, making complex architectures easy to understand at a glance.

These four features directly address key pain points in IaC practice: portability, cost control, security compliance, and architecture readability.

One-Click Terraform Export: A Key Design to Avoid Vendor Lock-in

Among products that generate infrastructure from natural language, a common concern is vendor lock-in — if generated configurations can only run on a specific platform, teams end up trapped in a new dependency.

TellIaC's emphasis on "1-click Terraform export" largely alleviates this concern. Terraform's HCL is the de facto universal standard in the IaC space today, and exporting results as HCL means:

• Generated code can run independently of TellIaC;
• It can be committed to Git for review, collaboration, and auditing;
• It integrates seamlessly with existing CI/CD pipelines.

Terraform's HCL became the de facto IaC standard due to several design characteristics: declarative syntax lets users describe desired state rather than operational steps; the State File mechanism tracks drift between actual deployments and code definitions; and the module system supports configuration reuse and hierarchical organizational management. As of 2024, the Terraform Registry hosts over 4,000 Providers and tens of thousands of community modules. OpenTofu, as an open-source fork of Terraform, has further solidified HCL's community standing. Therefore, exporting to HCL format means not only compatibility with the Terraform CLI but also access to the entire toolchain built around the Terraform ecosystem — including collaboration platforms like Atlantis, Spacelift, and env0.

In other words, TellIaC positions itself as an accelerator rather than a black box — it helps you quickly draft infrastructure, but the final output remains standard Terraform code that your team fully controls. This design philosophy is particularly important for serious production environment usage.

Cost Estimation and Security Scanning: A Deeper Look at Two Key Supporting Features

The Value of Cost Estimation in FinOps Practice

Cloud cost overruns are a universal challenge enterprises face after moving to the cloud. FinOps Foundation surveys show that an average of 30% of cloud spending is wasted. Integrating cost estimation into the IaC process (similar to Infracost's approach) allows teams to understand the cost impact of changes during the code review stage. Technical challenges in achieving accurate cost estimation include: complex cloud provider pricing models (with significant price differences between on-demand, reserved, and Spot instances), varying prices across regions, and difficulty in quantifying hidden costs like data transfer and API calls in advance. TellIaC providing cost estimates at the natural language description stage is particularly valuable for rapid prototyping and architecture comparison scenarios.

Technical Implementation of Security Scanning and Industry Benchmarks

IaC security scanning (also known as static analysis or Policy as Code) detects security vulnerabilities in configurations before code deployment. Mainstream specialized tools include Checkov, tfsec, KICS, and Snyk IaC, which detect issues based on standards like CIS Benchmarks, the NIST framework, and cloud provider best practices — for example, whether S3 buckets are publicly accessible, whether databases are encrypted, or whether security groups are overly permissive. A mature scanning engine typically needs to cover hundreds of detection rules and continuously keep pace with cloud service updates. The value of TellIaC's built-in security scanning lies in shifting security checks forward to the configuration generation stage — embodying the "Shift Left Security" philosophy — though whether its rule depth and coverage can match specialized tools remains to be verified.

The Value and Possibilities of Being Open Source

TellIaC is released as open source, clearly reflected in its Product Hunt category tags (Open Source, GitHub, Developer Tools). Being open source means:

• Teams can audit its generation logic to verify security and compliance;
• The community can contribute support for more resource types and cloud providers;
• Enterprises can customize and deploy it privately according to internal requirements.

For infrastructure tools that deal with cloud billing and security boundaries, the auditable and self-hostable nature of open source is often a significant advantage during enterprise tool selection.

A Realistic Perspective: The Boundaries of Natural Language IaC

As an early-stage product, TellIaC is currently better viewed as an exploration direction worth watching rather than a mature production-grade solution. Before large-scale adoption, several questions merit ongoing observation from practitioners:

• Accuracy: Natural language descriptions are inherently ambiguous — can the tool reliably convert vague requirements into resource definitions that match expectations?
• Complex scenarios: When facing real production needs like multi-environment, multi-account, and complex network topologies, is plain English description still efficient?
• Security scanning depth: What is the rule coverage and accuracy of the built-in security scanning, and can it replace or complement specialized security tools?
• State management: One of Terraform's core capabilities is tracking drift between actual resource state and desired state through State files — how does a natural-language-driven workflow coordinate with scenarios like incremental changes and state drift detection?

All of these need to be progressively validated through actual usage and community feedback.

Summary: A Pragmatic Exploration of Natural Language IaC

TellIaC represents a concrete implementation of the convergence trend between "natural language + Infrastructure as Code." It lowers the entry barrier with "write infrastructure in plain English," preserves engineering controllability with "one-click Terraform export," and layers on practical capabilities like cost estimation, security scanning, and visualization — a clear-minded and pragmatically positioned approach.

From a broader perspective, the direction TellIaC represents — embedding AI capabilities into the full lifecycle of infrastructure management — may herald the next evolution of the DevOps toolchain. As natural language understanding accuracy continues to improve, infrastructure management could be further simplified from "writing code" to "expressing intent," while standardized intermediate artifacts (like HCL code) ensure that engineering rigor is not lost in the simplification process.

For developers and DevOps teams looking to quickly draft cloud resource configurations without being locked into a platform, this open-source tool is worth keeping an eye on, with further production environment evaluation to come as its features mature and community grows.