Infrastructure as code ( IaC )

Dear Friend,

Six months ago, I asked a DevOps lead what's the challenge he face at his team.

He said, the team is good in creating the infra with cloud console. Yet, when it comes to automate them using IaC like terraform they needs his time.

Creating infra through console for the first time is way faster than writing IaC code.

But, the infra is creation isn't one time and it's ever growing, repeating need.

Frequent need to repeat an activity or change in a system makes manual work, a difficult task.

Why Terraform ?

Terraform have provisions to connect three major cloud providers and beyond.

So you are not required to connect the cloud providers API's to automate the system.

Specify your desired state, then terraform will do the rest.

Terraform workflow

1. Write - Author infrastructure as code
2. Plan?- Preview changes before applying
3. Apply?- Provision reproducible infrastructure

Sample terraform snippet

On the below snippet tells terraform that,

• The service provider will be Google and the region would be "us-central1"
• A compute instance to be created with a name "tf-instance-1"
• The machine type should be "n1-standard-1"
• Boot disk image will be "debian-cloud/debian-9"
• And finally this compute instance will be provisioned under default network.

// Tells terraform that we would like to use google provider

provider "google" {
  project     = "my-project"
  region      = "us-central1"
}

// The below code would create a compute instance 

resource "google_compute_instance" "tf-instance-1" {
  project = 12345677
  name = "tf-instance-1"
  machine_type = "n1-standard-1"

    
  boot_disk {
    initialize_params {
      image = "debian-cloud/debian-9"
    }
  }

  network_interface {
    network = "default"

    access_config {
      // Ephemeral IP
    }
  }
}        

Now, a cloud compute instance can be provisioned with below commands

1. terraform init - Pulls the provider resources so the above code can provision new compute instance
2. terraform plan - Shows you a Preview of changes
3. terraform apply - Provision infrastructure as mentioned in the file.
4. terraform destroy will remove the infrastructure.

Next Step ?

Get started with Terraform here