Book Image

Getting Started with Terraform - Second Edition

By : Kirill Shirinkin
1 (1)
Book Image

Getting Started with Terraform - Second Edition

1 (1)
By: Kirill Shirinkin

Overview of this book

Terraform is a tool used to efficiently build, configure, and improve the production infrastructure. It can manage the existing infrastructure as well as create custom in-house solutions. This book shows you when and how to implement infrastructure as a code practices with Terraform. It covers everything necessary to set up the complete management of infrastructure with Terraform, starting with the basics of using providers and resources. It is a comprehensive guide that begins with very small infrastructure templates and takes you all the way to managing complex systems, all using concrete examples that evolve over the course of the book. The book ends with the complete workflow of managing a production infrastructure as code—this is achieved with the help of version control and continuous integration. The readers will also learn how to combine multiple providers in a single template and manage different code bases with many complex modules. It focuses on how to set up continuous integration for the infrastructure code. The readers will be able to use Terraform to build, change, and combine infrastructure safely and efficiently.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Chapter 4. Storing and Supplying Configuration

So far, we know how to codify our infrastructure into Terraform templates of varying sizes. We know how to structure templates and how to split and reuse them with modules. More than this, we have already figured out important concepts behind how Terraform works. But there is an important piece we have hardly looked at: configuration.

A template with only hardcoded data in it is a bad template. You can't reuse it in other projects without modifying it. You will always have to update it by hand if some value changes. And you have to store a lot of information that doesn't really belong to the infrastructure template.

In this chapter, we will learn how to make Terraform templates more configurable. First, we will take a lookup variables and all the possible ways to use them. Then, we will learn how to use data resources to retrieve information from outside Terraform template. Finally, we will use built-in provider's capabilities to generate random...