Book Image

Getting Started with Terraform

By : Kirill Shirinkin
Book Image

Getting Started with Terraform

By: Kirill Shirinkin

Overview of this book

Terraform is a tool used to efficiently build, configure, and improve production infrastructure. It can manage 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 complete management of infrastructure with Terraform, starting with the basics of using providers and resources. This book 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. It finishes with the complete workflow of managing a production infrastructure as code – this is achieved with the help of version control and continuous integration. At the end of this book, you will be familiar with advanced techniques such as multi-provider support and multiple remote modules.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Getting Started with Terraform
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Working with state


If you've read the output of the terraform apply command carefully, you might be really curious about what this part means:

The state of your infrastructure has been saved to the path 
below. This state is required to modify and destroy your 
infrastructure, so keep it safe. To inspect the complete state 
use the `terraform show` command. 
State path: terraform.tfstate

What it means is that Terraform didn't simply create an instance and forget about it. It actually saved everything it knows about this instance to a special file, named the state file. In this file, Terraform stores the state of all the resources it created. This file is saved to the same directory where the Terraform template is, with the .tfstate extension. The format of the state file is simple json. Let's take a look at it piece by piece.

{ 
    "version": 3, 
    "terraform_version": "0.8.2", 
    "serial": 1, 
    "lineage": "65a6dc1b-3f42-4f23-8df1-8b2275602aff...