Book Image

Infrastructure as Code for Beginners

By : Russ McKendrick
4 (1)
Book Image

Infrastructure as Code for Beginners

4 (1)
By: Russ McKendrick

Overview of this book

The Infrastructure as Code (IaC) approach ensures consistent and repeatable deployment of cloud-based IaaS/PaaS services, saving you time while delivering impeccable results. Infrastructure as Code for Beginners is a practical implementation guide that helps you gain a clear understanding of the foundations of Infrastructure as Code and make informed decisions when implementing it. With this book, you’ll uncover essential IaC concepts, including planning, selecting, and implementing the right tools for your project. With step-by-step explanations and real-world examples, you'll gain a solid understanding of the benefits of IaC and the scope of application in your projects. You'll learn about the pros, cons, and best practices of different IaC tools such as Terraform and Ansible, and their use at different stages of the deployment process along with GitHub Actions. Using these tools, you'll be able to design, deploy, and secure your infrastructure on two major cloud platforms, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. In addition, you'll explore other IaC tools such as Pulumi, AWS CloudFormation, and Azure Bicep. By the end of this book, you’ll be well equipped to approach your IaC projects confidently.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
1
Part 1: The Foundations – An Introduction to Infrastructure as Code
5
Part 2: Getting Hands-On with the Deployment
9
Part 3: CI/CD and Best Practices

Introducing Terraform

The first of the two tools we will look at is Terraform by HashiCorp.

Hashicorp Terraform is an enterprise-ready cloud and virtualization management tool. It helps you manage your resources and deploy new instances with ease. Terraform is an open source tool for managing the cloud infrastructure, allowing you to not only efficiently configure and deploy your resources but also help you maintain your infrastructure while evolving it over time.

Terraform has a unique architecture in that it uses a state machine to manage resources and it is fully modular, and you can scale the service as per your needs. Finally, it is also integrated with many third-party tools and services.

Terraform uses the Hashicorp Configuration Language (HCL). You could be mistaken at first glance for thinking it is for JSON or YAML, but it’s a syntax and API designed by HashiCorp for building structured configuration formats, whereas YAML and JSON are just formats that define...