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

Creating an EC2 instance with Terraform


Resources are components of your infrastructure. They can be something as complex as a complete virtual server, or something as simple as a DNS record. Each resource belongs to a provider, and the type of the resource is suffixed with the provider name. The configuration of a resource takes the following form:

resource "provider-name_resource-type" "resource-name" { 
  parameter_name = parameter_value 
} 

The combination of resource type and resource name must be unique in your template; otherwise Terraform will complain.

There are three types of things you can configure inside a resource block: resource-specific parameters, meta-parameters, and provisioners. For now, let's focus on resource-specific parameters. They are unique to each resource type.

We will create an EC2 instance. The aws_instance resource is responsible for this job. To create an instance, we need to set at least two parameters: ami and instance_type. Some parameters are required, whereas...