Infrastructure as code allows managing infrastructure with configuration files (easy code) instead of a graphical user interface. IaC allows us to build, modify and manage infrastructure in a secure, steady, and iterative way, by defining resource configurations so that you can version control, reuse, and collaboratively share with others.
Terraform is HashiCorp’s infrastructure as a code tool. However, it defines infrastructure in human-readable, declarative configuration files, and manages the infrastructure’s lifecycle. There are various Advantages of Terraform for manually managing your infrastructure:
- Terraform manage infrastructure on multiple cloud platforms.
- Write infrastructure code quickly, with the help of human-readable configuration language.
- Terraform’s state allows you to track resource changes throughout your deployments.
- You can commit your configurations to version control to safely collaborate on infrastructure.
Deployment Workflow
Terraform plugins are called providers, Terraform interact with cloud platform and other services via their APIs. HashiCorp and the Terraform community have written over 1000 providers to manage resources on various Cloud Services for example – AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform(GCP), Kubernetes, Splunk, etc… Providers define the individual units of infrastructure as resources. Due to this you can comprise resources from different providers into reusable Terraform configurations called modules, and manage them with consistent language and workflow.
Terraform’s configuration language declarative for your infrastructure and procedural programming languages are step-by-step instruction that has performed tasks. Moreover, Terraform providers calculate dependencies between resources to create or destroy them in exact order.
Deploy infrastructure with Terraform:
Plan – Preview the changes Terraform will make to match your configuration.
Validate – Validate the planned changes.
Apply – Apply the validated changes.
Show – Show the changes.
Track infrastructure
The main source of your environment is the state file, Terraform keeps track of the state file. Terraform uses a state file to determine the changes to make infrastructure so that it will match your configuration.
Collaborate
Terraform collaborate on your infrastructure with its remote state backends. Terraform Cloud is secure to share your state and provides a stable environment for Terraform to run in. It prevents conditions like when multiple people make configuration changes at once. It also manages changes to your infrastructure through version control.