I wanted to get the discussion going about officially supporting s390x and ppc64le architectures. I see more and more teams at IBM embracing Terraform. Sometimes there are use cases where we need to run Terraform locally on a s390x or ppc64le machine, instead of using our laptops.
As it currently stands, I been porting over the officially supported Terraform providers, but this is more than just a trivial process. My workflow is to port over a provider when someone’s automation requires it.
It would be nice to just to have Terraform and the official providers built for s390x and ppc64le. I think there is a potential business value for both of us.
In order to build and to support the new architectures, you would need access to s390x and ppc64le resources. Getting s390x and ppc64le servers or access to build pipelines can be arranged.
One of the ways to get you access is to utilize Oregon State University’s pipeline resources. Here are some links to check out, https://osuosl.org/services/powerdev/ and http://osuosl.org/services/ibm-z/. I have more experience with the s390x pipeline, but I imagine the ppc64le pipeline is similar.
If that does not fit your current build workflow/pipeline, we could set up some servers running on s390x and ppc64le, that you would have full access to, thus allow you to pull them into your build process. This method is a little more flexible but requires a little more setup.
For more details on our existing conversation on this topic, you can reference https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/pull/18708.