Book Image

Getting Started with Terraform - Second Edition

By : Kirill Shirinkin
Book Image

Getting Started with Terraform - Second Edition

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

Using third-party plugins


Regardless of how convenient it is to connect Terraform with other external tools, such as configuration management systems, one would always prefer a built-in, native solution. An example is, as discussed previously, the Chef provisioner: while it's possible to do exactly the same with remote-exec, it's much faster to use a special provisioner written just for this purpose. Unfortunately, while the list of supported providers is long, some of the technologies or services you need will be missing.

Luckily, Terraform has a plugin-based architecture, and it's trivial to extend it with custom providers and provisioners. Plugins are written in the Go programming language, and if you want to write your own, you need to have at least basic knowledge of it.

There are plugins available on GitHub that you could use. Ideally, developers should contribute these providers and provisioners to the Terraform core. Sometimes, though, it's not possible: it takes time to create and...