Terraform- a popular open-source infrastructure tool

Today I am going to discuss a few very important things about Terraform. Some of you might have familiar with this tool. What you are waiting for let's get started;

Terraform is one of the popular open-source infrastructure tools that is used as code software, first developed by HashiCorp Pvt. Ltd. Terraform is a user-defined and data center infrastructure service provider that uses various HashiCorp languages, optionally it uses the JSON structure language rather than XML. The main purpose of using terraform platform is to build, change, and update the infrastructure functionality safely and effectively. Terraform also helps users to manage the existing service providers as well as customized in-house solutions. With the help of Terraform configuration files (Config.exe), you can describe the components which are used to run a single software application or entire business data center. One of the popular Amazon products that makes use of the Terraform infrastructure code is “AWS” to create, update, and modify the Amazon editions.

How does terraform work?

As I said earlier, Terraform is a popular platform used for changing, application versioning, and updating infrastructure efficiently and safely. Terraform is built on a “plug-in” based architecture. This kind of architecture enables the developers to extend the terraform features by adding new plugins or compiling the modified versions of already existing plugins.?

The following image illustrates the architectural workflow of the terraform;

Terraform architecture is mainly divided into two parts, they are;

• Terraform core
• Terraform plugins?

Firstly, terraform core uses the RFCs (remote functional calls) to establish communication between the plugins and also provides multiple ways to load and discover various plug-ins to use. Terraform plugins explore their beneficial features for specific amazon services such as AWS, and provisioners such as “BASH” files.?

Terraform core is a statistically written compiled binary structure that uses the Go programming language. The compiled binary is nothing but a Command-line interface (CLI). Follow this Github repository to use the terraform codes;github.com/hashicorp/terraform.

The primary roles of the terraform core include are;

• It allows users to make use of Infrastructure as a code for reading and interpolating the configuration files and function modules.
• Act as a resource state management.
• Constructing the resource graph.
• Execution of business plans.
• Establishes communication over the RFCs.

The next component is terraform plugins. The terraform plugins are written in Go programming language that invokes the binary executable files and transmits over RPC. All providers and provisioners are used in Terraform configuration as plugins. The terraform plugins are executed as a separate process and communicate with the binary through RPCs.

The primary roles of the terraform plugins are as follows;

• Initialize the binary libraries to make API calls.
• Easy to authenticate with various infrastructure providers.
• Define the resource that performs specific tasks.

What is terraform used for?

The below are the key benefits of using Terraform tool;

• The terraform can be used as reproducible infrastructure management.
• Reduces the production incident that arises due to environment configuration errors.
• Increases the velocity and reliability.
• Eliminates the wait-time for environment provisioning.
• Helps in cleaning the work environment.?
• The business benefits of defining infrastructure as code reduce the costs of system management and also lower the risk of unexpected problems that arise when modifications of infrastructure are implemented.

Happy learning!