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

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 throughout. They are as follows:

  • Chef, Ansible, and Puppet: For configuration management
  • Inspec and Test Kitchen: 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 the 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 your first template. Decide on how...