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

The many tools around Terraform


Terraform is a small tool. While reading this book, you've hopefully noted how many different other tools were introduced all the time. They are as follows:

  • Chef, Ansible, and Puppet: For configuration management

  • Inspec and TestKitchen: For testing

  • Terragrunt and Terraforming: As a helper for Terraform operations

  • Git, git-crypt, GitLab, and GitLab CI: For teamwork

  • S3 and Consul: For storage

  • Bash and Ruby: For scripting

You have to learn all of these (or their analogues) to make Terraform production ready. The focus of all HashiCorp tools is to solve one problem and solve it well, and leave everything else to other software out there.

It can be beneficial quite often - you are not forced to change your toolset, you can pretty much naturally integrate Terraform into your workflows without any big sacrifices. Introducing Terraform to an existing environment is easy. Pick one particular service you want to manage with it and write first template. Decide on how you want...