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

Returning data with outputs


We've already talked very briefly about outputs in previous chapters. By this time, you should already know what they are. However, let's recap their usage anyway.

Outputs allow the returning of data from the Terraform template after it was applied using the terraform output command. For example, to return the IP address of an EC2 instance, we could define an output as follows:

output "public_ip" { 
   value = "${aws_instance.web-server.public_ip}" 
} 

That allows us to easily pass this data to other scripts and tools. For example, with this approach, we could run tests against our servers. Enter Inspec.