HashiCorp Terraform is an infrastructure as code tool that lets you define both cloud and on-prem resources in human-readable configuration files that you can version, reuse, and share. You can then use a consistent workflow to provision and manage all of your infrastructure throughout its lifecycle. Terraform can manage low-level components like compute, storage, and networking resources, as well as high-level components like DNS entries and SaaS features.
Who is it for?
f you’re a TPX developer working on infrastructure provisioning and management, Terraform is a tool you can’t afford to miss. This powerful infrastructure as code solution allows you to define and manage both cloud and on-premises resources using human-readable configuration files.
Key benefits for TPX developers:
- Consistency and repeatability: Terraform ensures that your infrastructure is provisioned and managed consistently, reducing errors and improving efficiency.
- Version control: Manage your infrastructure configuration as code, making it easy to track changes, collaborate with team members, and revert to previous states.
- Reusable modules: Create reusable Terraform modules to streamline your development process and promote code reusability.
- Flexibility: Terraform supports a wide range of cloud providers and on-premises infrastructure, giving you the flexibility to choose the best solution for your needs.
By leveraging Terraform, TPX developers can streamline their infrastructure management workflows, improve efficiency, and deliver high-quality solutions.
How to use it?
Terraform creates and manages resources on cloud platforms and other services through their application programming interfaces (APIs). Providers enable Terraform to work with virtually any platform or service with an accessible API.
HashiCorp and the Terraform community have already written thousands of providers to manage many different types of resources and services. You can find all publicly available providers on the Terraform Registry, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Kubernetes, Helm, GitHub, Splunk, DataDog, and many more.
The core Terraform workflow consists of three stages:
- Write: You define resources, which may be across multiple cloud providers and services. For example, you might create a configuration to deploy an application on virtual machines in a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) network with security groups and a load balancer.
- Plan: Terraform creates an execution plan describing the infrastructure it will create, update, or destroy based on the existing infrastructure and your configuration.
- Apply: On approval, Terraform performs the proposed operations in the correct order, respecting any resource dependencies. For example, if you update the properties of a VPC and change the number of virtual machines in that VPC, Terraform will recreate the VPC before scaling the virtual machines.
Community terraform modules¶
Community terraform modules can be found under the following GitHub repositories:
- https://github.comcast.com/terraform-community-modules
- Curated Modules with Best Practices enabled (testing, linting, validation, security and documentation checks etc.) – https://github.com/comcast-terraform-community-modules
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