Terraform: Up and Running

Chapter 2. Getting Started with Terraform

In this chapter, you’re going to learn the basics of how to use Terraform. It’s an easy tool to learn, so in the span of about 30 pages, you’ll go from running your first Terraform commands all the way up to using Terraform to deploy a cluster of servers with a load balancer that distributes traffic across them. This infrastructure is a good starting point for running scalable, highly available web services and microservices. In subsequent chapters, you’ll evolve this example even further.

Terraform can provision infrastructure across public cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, Google Cloud, and DigitalOcean, as well as private cloud and virtualization platforms such as OpenStack and VMWare. For just about all of the code examples in this chapter and the rest of the book, you are going to use AWS. AWS is a good choice for learning Terraform because:

• AWS is the most popular cloud infrastructure provider, by far. It has a 45% share in the cloud infrastructure market, which is more than the next three biggest competitors (Microsoft, Google, and IBM) combined.

• AWS provides a huge range of reliable and scalable cloud hosting services, including: Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which you can use to deploy virtual servers; Auto Scaling Groups (ASGs), which make it easier to manage a cluster of virtual servers; and Elastic Load Balancers (ELBs), which you can use to distribute traffic across the cluster of virtual servers. ...