Terraform: A Beginner’s Guide to Infrastructure as Code
Introduction
The right infrastructure may be all that stands in the way of a successful, smoothly operating corporation in today’s IT-driven environment. Development of the cloud has given the IT industry a new dimension, bringing with it new possibilities, difficulties, and functionality.
This topic mainly gathers around management across several clouds, servers, and environments and it may easily become complicated and costly. However, an Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) solution is one of the greatest ways that businesses can run and expand infrastructure at scale.
In this article, we’ll explore more of Terraform, covering both IaC advantages and the fundamentals of Terraform.
What is IaC?
Instead of manually setting infrastructure resources through a user interface, Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a technique for designing, controlling, and delivering infrastructure resources through code. With version control, collaboration, and automation available as with any other codebase, this method enables infrastructure to be treated like any other program.
IaC also makes it easier to manage infrastructure at scale, as it allows for the use of software development best practices and tools to manage and configure resources.
One of the most widely used IaC tools is Terraform, which enables users to specify infrastructure resources in a declarative language and control them using code.
There are a few IaC tools currently on the market;
- Terraform
- AWS CloudFormation
- Azure Resource Manager
- Google Cloud Deployment Manager
- Pulumi
And so on.
What are the advantages of IaC?
IaC substitutes lines of code for the human labor and standard operating procedures needed to manage IT resources. It uses source code to automate infrastructure management rather than manually configuring cloud nodes or physical hardware.
- Speed and Simplicity: The delivery and management lifecycles are accelerated by IaC by getting rid of manual procedures. By only executing a script, it enables the creation of a comprehensive infrastructure design.
- Team Collaboration: Through tools like Github, many team members may work on IaC software in the same way they would with regular application code. For future usage and reference, it is simple to link code to issue tracking systems.
- Error Reduction: The probability of errors or deviations is reduced while establishing your infrastructure with IaC. Your configuration is totally standardized by the code, enabling apps to operate faultlessly and without the need for ongoing administrative control.
- Disaster Recovery: You can actually recover from disasters more quickly using IaC. Typically, all you need to do is execute the scripts again to provide the same software.
- Enhanced Security: IaC uses automation to eliminate numerous security vulnerabilities brought on by human mistake. Your system architecture’s overall security and the security of the data it holds significantly increases when an IaC-based solution is implemented appropriately.
While IaC has many additional advantages, enterprises frequently prefer to use tools like Terraform because of their speed, accuracy, data visibility, and security.
What is Terraform?
Users may create and manage infrastructure resources as code with the help of the well-known open-source Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool Terraform. This enables teams to work cooperatively and effectively by making it simple to establish, maintain, and version infrastructure.
DevOps teams use it mostly to automate different infrastructure operations. You can use it to write code to describe your whole infrastructure and this also applies for enabling you to create and manage these resources in parallel across providers, regardless of whether your servers are from the same provider. It supports a wide range of cloud and on-premises providers, including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, as well as custom in-house solutions.
Because of its strong plugin ecosystem and expressive declarative language, Terraform is a useful tool for automating and maintaining infrastructure at scale.
What is terraform used for?
There are mainly three cases that Terraform becomes handy;
- The provisioning of public clouds on major providers is one of the functions of Terraform such as providing an IaC for services like AWS and Azure. Through a provider, a plugin that wraps already-existing APIs and languages like Azure Bicep, and the creation of Terraform syntax, Terraform makes it possible to leverage these public clouds.
- Terraform’s second primary function is to make multi-cloud deployments easier. Contrary to some of its other IaC rivals, Terraform performs across all cloud providers concurrently, which is one of its primary selling points. Engineers may use the same syntax without having to become familiar with a variety of tools and technologies due to the flexibility to deploy resources into numerous cloud providers.
- Deploying, maintaining, and orchestrating resources with customized cloud providers is the third most frequent application of Terraform. Even if you don’t use AWS or another well-known cloud service, you may still use Terraform to wrap an existing API and convert it to its declarative syntax by leveraging a provider.
Other cases include;
- Users may easily obtain preconfigured setups through the registries that can be used as is or customized to fit specific needs which is usually referred to as self-service clusters.
- Terraform may also be used as a resource scheduler where resources on AWS may be stopped and started using Terraform modules.
- Lastly, developed code can be tested in a test environment using modules before it is put into use.
As briefly explained, Terraform enables IaC management of your whole IT ecosystem, whether it be deployed in a single cloud, several clouds, or a customized way.
How does it work?
Terraform enables you to use configuration files and version control to create and manage your whole infrastructure. Through their application programming interfaces, it builds and maintains resources on cloud platforms and other services (APIs). Terraform can integrate with practically any platform or service that has an accessible API via to providers.
Terraform analyzes the source code and converts it into an application programming interface (API) request to the resource provider when a command to deploy and execute a server, database, or load balancer is given. Developers can constantly increase the tool’s functionality by creating new plugins. This is the advantage of Terraform since it is open source.
It achieves these features by utilizing the Terraform Core and Terraform Provider components of the Terraform architecture.
- Terraform Core: Terraform core requires two input sources in order to function. First input should be the user’s configuration of Terraform’s source input, which specifies the resources that must be produced or provided. Then, data flows into Terraform on how the present infrastructure is constructed form the second input source.
- Terraform Provider: The second important component that runs Terraform are the providers. This usually refers to cloud service providers like AWS or Azure, however it may also refer to any other infrastructure as a service tool such as Kubernetes. It has various number of providers so that it can grant user access to its resources such providers include AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Azure, Kubernetes and so on. It also supports stacking such as stacking Kubernetes on top of Azure.
This is how Terraform operates; it uses the capability of both Core and Provider to swiftly construct your application and infrastructure using only code.
How to create Terraform Workflow?
The primary three stages of the Terraform workflow are as follows:
- First step is “Write” phase, where you will specify your infrastructure as code by using a special language referred to as Hashicorp Configuration Language (HCL). You basically define your resources which might span several cloud services and providers.
- Then the second step is “Plan”. In this phase, based on the current infrastructure and your setup, Terraform generates an execution plan defining the infrastructure it will construct, update, or delete. Then, based on a comparison between your specified infrastructure and the present condition of the available resources, it will show you its plan to either add or remove resources.
- Final step is referred to as “Apply” where it is asked your approval to perform the pre-given operations regarding the correct order. You can either approve or deny the addition/removal of any infrastructure resources. After that, Terraform will be able to completely deploy your infrastructure.
What are the advantages of using Terraform?
Among many benefits of using Terraform, these are the key ones of using Terraform;
- It supports multiple cloud platforms.
- It supports making gradual adjustments to the resources.
- You can develop infrastructure code more rapidly with the aid of the human-readable configuration language.
- You can monitor resource changes during your deployments due to Terraform’s state.
- To collaborate on infrastructure in a secure manner, you can submit your configurations to version control.
What are the disadvantages of using Terraform?
There are also some disadvantages that consist of;
- There is no error handling, and because of that it is difficult to debug. Since human nature is prone to doing mistakes, this might cause waste of time and efforts.
- States must always be in sync with the infrastructure.
- It has relatively expensive enterprise plan.
- If the users doesn’t prefer to use JSON format, they have to learn a new language referred to as HCL.
Conclusion
For DevOps teams, managing, orchestrating, and deploying multi-cloud environments can be extremely difficult. With IaC tools such as Terraform, these processes are easier to handle. Also, infrastructure creation and management are frequently not entirely the responsibility of developers, but when they feel confident doing it, everyone benefits.
In conclusion, an effective tool for controlling infrastructure as code is Terraform. It enables customers to specify their infrastructure using a high-level configuration language, deploy that infrastructure across several cloud and on-premises platforms, and manage that infrastructure. This facilitates collaboration on infrastructure modifications and version control, as well as helping to ensure that infrastructure is delivered consistently and predictably. Organizations may use Terraform to increase the infrastructure’s effectiveness, dependability, and scalability while reducing the likelihood of human mistake.
Thanks for reading, I hope you’ll find this article useful.
References
If you want to take a further step and learn more about Terraform, then you can check out Sumeet Ninawe’s hands-on tutorial “Terraform Tutorial — Getting Started With Terraform on AWS”.
