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

Understanding dependency graph


Terraform doesn't simply build your resources and write their configuration into a state file. Internally, it also manages a dependency graph of all resources you have. It's hard to see with a single resource, but now we have two interconnected resources: VPC and a subnet. The latter one depends on the existence of the first one. But wait, what is a dependency graph anyway?

First of all, let's recall what a graph is. We won't go deep into mathematical formulas and advanced graph theories and examples here. Graph theory is big, and there are so many applications of it.

Though there are many definitions of the graph, which differ depending on the knowledge area and industry, the simplest description of what it sounds like a set of nodes and edges, where edges represent a connection between two nodes. It's easier to see a graph than to read about it:

Here, we have two nodes connected to each other. Nothing really complicated. What is a dependency graph then? Let...