Terraform - IAC

 

Lot of tools available if you search for infrastructure as code: 

• Chef
• Puppet
• Ansible
• SaltStack
• CloudFormation
• Terraform

But Cloudformation and Terraform are provisioning tools. Here we will discuss about Terraform.

Terraform is the infrastructure as code offering from HashiCorp. It is a tool for

• building, 
• changing, 
• managing infrastructure

 in a safe, repeatable way. 

Infrastructure as Code

It is the process of managing infrastructure in a file(s) rather than manually configuring resources in a user interface. A resource in this instance is any piece of infrastructure in a given environment, such as a virtual machine, security group, network interface, etc.

Terraform

• Terraform allows operators to use HCL to author files containing definitions of their desired resources.
• Almost any provider (AWS, GCP, GitHub, Docker, etc)

Workflows

A simple workflow for deployment will follow closely to the steps below.

• Scope - Confirm what resources need to be created for a given project.
• Author - Create the configuration file in HCL based on the scoped parameters
• Initialize - Run terraform init in the project directory with the configuration files. This will download the correct provider plug-ins for the project.
• Plan & Apply - Run terraform plan to verify creation process and then terraform apply to create real resources as well as state file that compares future changes in your configuration files to what actually exists in your deployment environment.

Advantages

• Platform Agnostic
• State Management
• Operator Confidence

Install Terraform

Follow Install terraform to install.