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

Returning data with outputs


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

Outputs allow returning data from the Terraform template after it was applied using the terraform output command. For example, to return the IP address of some 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.