Terraform

Over the years, cloud development has seen a major paradigm shift. Newer and more complex applications are deployed rapidly to the cloud to minimize downtime. And through all of this, the concept of Infrastructure-as-Code and various tools have emerged to simplify the process of application development. You might be wondering: what is Infrastructure-as-Code? How does it improve the development process and experience, and where does Terraform come into the picture? Well, we’ll explore all this and more in this guide.…

Introduction Terraform outputs are used to extract information about the infrastructure resources from the project state. Using other features of the Hashicorp Configuration Language (HCL), which Terraform uses, resource information can be queried and transformed into more complex data structures, such as lists and maps. Outputs are useful for providing information to external software, which can operate on the created infrastructure resources. In this tutorial, you’ll learn about Terraform output syntax and its parameters by creating a simple infrastructure that…

Introduction Hashicorp Configuration Language (HCL), which Terraform uses, provides many useful structures and capabilities that are present in other programming languages. Using loops in your infrastructure code can greatly reduce code duplication and increase readability, allowing for easier future refactoring and greater flexibility. HCL also provides a few common data structures, such as lists and maps (also called arrays and dictionaries respectively in other languages), as well as conditionals for execution path branching. Unique to Terraform is the ability to…

Introduction Structuring Terraform projects appropriately according to their use cases and perceived complexity is essential to ensure their maintainability and extensibility in day-to-day operations. A systematic approach to properly organizing code files is necessary to ensure that the project remains scalable during deployment and usable to you and your team. In this tutorial, you’ll learn about structuring Terraform projects according to their general purpose and complexity. Then, you’ll create a project with a simple structure using the more common features…

The author selected the Free and Open Source Fund to receive a donation as part of the Write for DOnations program. Introduction Terraform offers advanced features that become increasingly useful as your project grows in size and complexity. It’s possible to alleviate the cost of maintaining complex infrastructure definitions for multiple environments by structuring your code to minimize repetitions and introducing tool-assisted workflows for easier testing and deployment. Terraform associates a state with a backend, which determines where and how…

The author selected the Wikimedia Foundation to receive a donation as part of the Write for DOnations program. Introduction Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a practice of automating infrastructure deployment and modifications by defining the resource states and their relationships in code. Executing that code then creates or modifies the actual resources in the cloud. IaC allows engineers to use an IaC tool like Terraform (by HashiCorp) for provisioning infrastructure. With IaC, changes to your infrastructure can go through the…

Introduction Terraform is a tool for building and managing infrastructure in an organized way. You can use it to manage DigitalOcean Droplets, Load Balancers, and even DNS entries, in addition to a large variety of services offered by other providers. Terraform uses a command-line interface and can run from your desktop or a remote server. Terraform works by reading configuration files that describe the components that make up your application environment or datacenter. Based on the configuration, it generates an…

The author selected the Free and Open Source Fund to receive a donation as part of the Write for DOnations program. Introduction When multiple people are working on the same Terraform project from different locations simultaneously, it is important to handle the infrastructure code and project state correctly to avoid overwriting errors. The solution is to store the state remotely instead of locally. A remote system is available to all members of your team, and it is possible for them…

The author selected the Free and Open Source Fund to receive a donation as part of the Write for DOnations program. Introduction Terraform modules allow you to group distinct resources of your infrastructure into a single, unified resource. You can reuse them later with possible customizations, without repeating the resource definitions each time you need them, which is beneficial to large and complexly structured projects. You can customize module instances using input variables you define as well as extract information…