abstractions

General-purpose IaC earns its complexity where application engineers own infrastructure and benefit from typed components and unit tests. It disappoints when the pitch was freedom: the engine still builds a graph, still keeps state, and still forbids most of the clever runtime logic people expect to write.

Generation works when the inputs are genuinely data and dies when YAML grows loops. The line between encoding decisions and writing a worse programming language is where these interviews are actually scored.