Terraform Series Part 1: High level Introduction to Terraform

Terraform is a tool for building, changing and versioning infrastructure safely and efficiently.

Features:

1. Write Cloud Infrastructure as Code using Hashicorp Language (HCl)
2. Reproducible Environments
3. Idempotence & Convergence
4. Easing Collaboration
5. Self-Service Infrastructure

Supported Infrastructures:

1. Public Clouds like AWS, GCP, Microsoft Azure
2. Private Clouds like OpenStack, vSphere, CloudStack
3. Software & Services like MySQL, GitHub and Chef

When to use Terraform:

1. For Multi-Cloud Deployments
2. Multi-Tier Apps
3. Disposable Environments
4. Resource Schedulers

Products offered by Terraform:

1. Open Source – With Open Source Terraform you can provision any Infrastructure
2. Professional – Offers collaboration and operations features for Teams
3. Premium – Governance and policy features for organisations

Terraform Workflow

Step 1: Write/Modify Configuration files

Step 2: Create an execution plan (.plan command)

Step 3: Review the plan (if rejected, go back to Step 1 else proceed to Step 4)

Step 4: Apply the changes (.apply command)

Resource Graphs in Terraform:

• Terraform offers resource graphs which help capture dependency information in your infrastructure.
• It enables parallel changes to your infrastructure.
• Resource graphs can be visualized

Automation Workflows in Terraform includes Integrating into CI/CD pipelines which offers Auto Accept, Manual Accept, and Plan Only.

In Upcoming posts in this series we will see more detailed features of Terraform.