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Terraform multicloud orchestrator version 1.0

Beautiful Arrangement

Article from ADMIN 69/2022

By Martin Loschwitz

HashiCorp's Terraform delivers orchestration for multiple cloud environments and supports a huge set of target platforms. Version 1.0 is considered a milestone.

Automation is not just "nice to have" in the data center – it is an absolute requirement. The much-cited shortage of skilled employees alone is forcing companies to use automation to free up development resources by letting well-trained employees get on with the interesting work rather than keeping them busy with repetitive tasks.

Many admins today don't even bother fully automating their own bare metal, in large part because of the cloud, which seeks to help admins forget all their worries. Yet it is precisely the cloud that impressively shows that many problems don't disappear at all but simply mutate. However, automation in a cloud environment, called orchestration, has to work differently than on bare metal.

Orchestration originally arose as a special form of automation, wherein a template file describes how the virtual environment should appear and then feeds this request to a special service for evaluation (Figure 1). The orchestrator then draws on the other cloud services to create the required resources in a completely automatic and mutually coordinated way.