Terraform: Up and Running

Preface

A long time ago, in a data center far, far away, an ancient group of powerful beings known as sysadmins used to deploy infrastructure manually. Every server, every database, every load balancer, and every bit of network configuration was created and managed by hand. It was a dark and fearful age: fear of downtime, fear of accidental misconfiguration, fear of slow and fragile deployments, and fear of what would happen if the sysadmins fell to the dark side (i.e., took a vacation). The good news is that thanks to the DevOps movement, there is now a better way to do things: Terraform.

Terraform is an open source tool created by HashiCorp that allows you to define your infrastructure as code using a simple, declarative programming language, and to deploy and manage that infrastructure across a variety of public cloud providers (e.g., Amazon Web Services, Azure, Google Cloud, DigitalOcean) and private cloud and virtualization platforms (e.g., OpenStack, VMWare) using a few commands. For example, instead of manually clicking around a web page or running dozens of commands, here is all the code it takes to configure a server on Amazon Web Services:

provider "aws" {
  region = "us-east-1"
}

resource "aws_instance" "example" {
  ami           = "ami-40d28157"
  instance_type = "t2.micro"
}

And to deploy it, you just run one command:

> terraform apply

Thanks to its simplicity and power, Terraform is rapidly emerging as a key player in the DevOps world. It allows you to replace the tedious, fragile, ...