Terraform Cookbook

Chapter 8. Configuration Management with Terraform

This chapter explores how Terraform can be used for configuration management tasks, ensuring the desired state of system configurations across your infrastructure.

Configuration management involves establishing and maintaining consistency in a system’s performance by creating a detailed recording of its information. This information can include details about servers, software, hardware, and other installed components.

Configuration management ensures that all system components operate as intended and that any changes to these components are made systematically to avoid potential disruptions. It’s a critical process in modern IT, helping teams automate tasks, boost productivity, and reduce the potential for human errors.

Terraform’s primary strength lies in managing infrastructure resources across a broad spectrum of services and providers. While it doesn’t directly manage software configurations within servers, it can effectively interact with dedicated configuration management tools, providing a unified and automated method of managing your infrastructure and its configuration.

By the end of this chapter, you’ll have a comprehensive understanding of how to use Terraform for various configuration management tasks, enabling you to create more robust and flexible infrastructure-as-code solutions.

8.1 Writing Shell Scripts with Terraform

Problem

You need to automate the creation of infrastructure with Terraform while also running ...