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

Baking images with Packer


Packer was released back in 2013 with a goal to simplify, automate, and codify the image creation process. It removes all the pain from baking images for different platforms, by replacing many manual steps with a single JSON template fed to the CLI. It is written in the Go programming language, just like Terraform. Installing it is a piece of cake--just download the archive for your operating system from https://www.packer.io/downloads.html and extract the binary to a directory available in your $PATH environment variable. Then, verify your installation:

$> packer -v
0.12.0

You are all set up to bake images! To do so, just run packer build my_template.json. It won't work, of course, because we don't have a template yet. Create the base.json file and let's start filling it in. Our goal is to bake a Centos 7 AMI with all packages updated and Puppet installed.

The only required section for the template is Builders array definition. Builders are configuration blocks...