Terraform Basics

• Terraform was first released in July 2014 by a company named HashiCorp. It is the same company that brought us tool, such as Vagrant, Packer, and Vault. Being the fifth tool in the HashiCorp stack, it focused on providing a way to describe the complete infrastructure as code

• Read about - DevOps and DevSecOps

Available Options

• For AWS - Cloud formation

• For Azure - ARM (Azure Resource Manager Templates)

IAC - Infrastructure as code

• Manage infrastructure through code

• Source of truth

• Building infrastructure is a coding task

• Management of infrastructure

Problems with manual deployment

• Complicated

• Human error

• Not repeatable

IAC - Why use it ?

• Automated infrastructure creation

• Small team

• Reduces manual labour

• Frees up time for features

• Mitigates risk of error

• Deployment is cheaper

• Reduce deployment risk

• Reliable

• Repeatable

🤔 Things to keep in mind

• State file and management

• Rollback methods

• What if Terraform .tf script is partially executed ?
  • On partial execution - Let’s say network / power failure
  • On comeback; it checks the state with AWS and resumes from appropriate state

• What happens if 2 devops engineers push code at same time ?
  • Ex: A and B tries to make changes to particular subnet address
  • State is acquired for devops engineer A before B

• It is best practice to keep clear line of difference between using Terraform and Ansible

• terraform destroy will cause catastrophic failure and error - Ensure while executing destroy command