Very interesting ChatGPT

The hype right now is how AI is taking over our jobs and ChatGPT which is a recent OpenAI addition is pushing this rhetoric further into the spotlight. At this time I am not going to take a stand either way. Currently, I see it as a tool that can help drive human creativity when working with complex subjects. In this article, I am going to explore this phenomenon a little deeper to see how it can be used to help optimize Terraform code.

I asked the ChatGPT AI:

And this is the answer it provided:

Creating resources in Azure using a YAML configuration file and a for_each loop in Terraform can be a powerful and flexible way to manage your infrastructure. By defining your resources in a YAML file, you can easily maintain and update the configuration of your resources without having to write complex Terraform code.

To get started, you'll need to create a YAML file that contains a list of the resources you want to create in Azure. Each resource should have a name and location property, as well as any other properties that are required for the specific resource type. For example, if you want to create an Azure resource group, your YAML file might look something like this:

resources
  - name: my-resource-group
    location: eastus
  - name: another-resource-group
    location: westus:        

Once you have your YAML file, you can use Terraform to create the resources in Azure. To do this, you'll need to load the YAML file using the data block, create a local variable that contains the list of resources from the YAML file, and then use a for_each loop to iterate over each resource and create it in Azure.

Here is an example of how you might do this in Terraform:

# Load the YAML file containing the resource configuration
data "yaml" "config" {
  source = "config.yaml"
}

# Create a local variable for the list of resources to create
locals {
  resources = yaml.config.resources
}

# Loop through each resource in the list and create it using the `azurerm_resource_group` resource
resource "azurerm_resource_group" "example" {
  for_each = local.resources

  name     = each.value.name
  location = each.value.location
}        

In this example, the data block loads the YAML file and stores the data in a yaml object. The locals block then creates a resources variable that holds the list of resources from the YAML file. Finally, the for_each loop iterates over each resource in the list and creates an Azure resource group using the azurerm_resource_group resource. The name and location of each resource group are set using the properties from the YAML file.

Note that this is just an example, and you may need to adjust the code to fit your specific use case. For example, you might want to create different types of resources, such as virtual machines or storage accounts, or you might want to use different properties for each resource. You can also use the yamldecode function to convert the YAML data into a map data type, which makes it easier to access the properties of each resource.

In conclusion, using a YAML configuration file and a for_each loop in Terraform is a convenient and flexible way to manage your Azure resources. By defining your resources in a YAML file, you can easily maintain and update the configuration of your resources without having to write complex Terraform code. This can save you time and effort, and make it easier to manage your infrastructure in Azure.

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Not bad eh? For clarity I did not write one bit of the content above and yet... it seems so human? So real... This design is untested yet the code looks pretty reasonable (I will definitely be testing this out in my lab).

I think that this tooling is going to save us from hours of typing mundane things out that should already be readily available. Sure the information above isn't exactly what I would do but it provides a different perspective and some insight into another way. I think https://chat.openai.com/ is going to have a permanent tab open... I already can see how this would be faster than using a traditional search engine and will likely be using it as long as it is available to me... we are living in some interesting times friends.

Until next time and thanks for reading!

-Dave