Infrastructure as Code with Terraform

Geographically Diverse Failover in the Cloud

Article from ADMIN 46/2018

By Chris Binnie

With the Terraform configuration management tools and the Amazon Route 53 DNS service, you can configure AWS to provide geographically diverse failover between two web servers.

Special Thanks: This article was made possible by support from Linux Professional Institute

If you ask people within DevOps circles, they’ll tell you that Infrastructure as Code is the way forward. To create infrastructure automatically in a consistent and predictable manner, at least, the DevOps community has embraced a number of extensible tools.

Terraform from HashiCorp is one of the market leaders. It’s not a particularly new technological offering, in that it’s more than two years old, but it’s still absolutely key to running infrastructure in the cloud in an effective and efficient way.

Terraform can speak to multiple cloud providers, making it highly flexible and offering management teams a somewhat conditional promise of having the ability to run cloud-agnostic infrastructure. Cloud providers also provide their own tools, of course, such as CloudFormation from Amazon Web Services (AWS), but to my mind, Terraform is more popular for good reason.

Terraform comprises software known as configuration management tools, although you can still run server-specific code with Terraform when you’re creating servers, for example. One approach is to use a configuration management tool like Ansible or Puppet to alter the configuration on servers you’ve created with Terraform once the infrastructure is spun up.

In this article, I’ll look at some very simple uses of Terraform on AWS, along with the last bit of the jigsaw (i.e., testing the setup to make sure it is performing as designed), which I still need to get my head around and will at some point in the future turn into Terraform code.

I wrote this Terraform code because a thought occurred to me recently about the simplest

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