Introduction to Terraform

DevOps

• How Hashicorp Consul Helps Secure ACL Communication
• Introduction to Terraform
• Introduction to Ansible
• Deploying Infrastructure with Terraform

Terraform is an open-source infrastructure as code tool that allows you to define and manage infrastructure resources in a cloud provider such as AWS, GCP, or Azure. It uses a simple, declarative language called HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) to describe the resources that should be created and the desired state of those resources.

One of the key benefits of terraform is that it is cloud-agnostic, meaning that it can be used to manage resources in multiple cloud providers using a single configuration language. This makes it easy to migrate resources between cloud providers or to create multi-cloud environments. It also allows you to use a single tool to manage resources across different cloud providers, rather than having to use separate tools for each provider.

Terraform uses the concept of “providers” to interface with different cloud providers. Each provider is a separate plugin that implements the necessary logic to create and manage resources in a specific cloud provider. Terraform comes with a number of built-in providers, and there are also many third-party providers available that can be used to manage resources in other services and platforms.

Terraform configurations are made up of one or more “resources” that represent the infrastructure resources that should be created. Each resource has a type (e.g., “aws_instance” for an Amazon EC2 instance) and a set of configuration parameters that define the desired state of the resource. Terraform also supports the use of variables, which can be used to parameterize configurations and make them more reusable.

Terraform uses the concept of “workspaces” to allow you to manage multiple environments or configurations within a single configuration. This can be useful for scenarios such as managing multiple stages of a deployment (e.g., development, staging, and production) or for creating resource groups within a single cloud provider account.

Here is an example terraform configuration that creates an Amazon S3 bucket:

provider "aws" {
  region = "us-west-2"
}

resource "aws_s3_bucket" "my_bucket" {
  bucket = "my-bucket"
  acl    = "private"
}

This configuration specifies the “aws” provider and the region to use when creating resources. It also defines a single resource of type “aws_s3_bucket” with the name “my_bucket”. The resource has two configuration parameters: the name of the bucket, and the ACL to use when creating the bucket. When this configuration is applied, terraform will create an S3 bucket in the specified region with the specified name and ACL.