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Infrastructure as Code with Terraform

Blueprint

Article from ADMIN 43/2018

By Christian Rost

Application releases can take place several times a day. Terraform helps you roll out virtual machines automatically in your data center or in the cloud, and you adapt the manual only when it changes.

Gone are the days when you spend nights preparing your infrastructure for new software releases. Development cycles are getting shorter and shorter, and development teams are becoming more agile. Another concern is automation, which you can implement with configuration management. For example, just describe the configuration of virtual machines (VMs) to deliver and update them later according to a blueprint.

Terraform [1] by HashiCorp uses this idea to provision or adapt infrastructures. They also provide Vagrant, which handles the deployment of development environments. Terraform not only supports clean provisioning of the infrastructure, it also lets you change already provisioned environments. Terraform expects text configuration files, which are simply known as "configurations," with a .tf file extension. They can be versioned with tools like Git or SVN.

Choose between HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) and JSON formats. Although HCL is based on JSON, it supports comments and some other extensions to simplify coding. The code examples in this article use the HCL format.

Blueprint

Terraform does almost all the work involved in deploying the virtual infrastructure, starting with provisioning VMs with VMware and OpenStack in your data center, as well as with Amazon and Oracle cloud providers, extending all the way to adjustments of the DNS or monitoring server. For this purpose, Terraform uses different providers [2] to provide resources for the corresponding platforms, which in turn feed into the configurations.

In this article, I use DigitalOcean [3] to provide insight into how Terraform works and, using the example, to show that the Infrastructure as Code paradigm does not have to be

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