Introduction to Terraform
Introduction to Terraform
Terraform allows you to build, change, and version infrastructure in a safe and efficient manner. It creates your infrastructure from code that you have defined. Components like compute instances, storage, and networking, as well as high-level features like DNS entries and SaaS, are included.
In Terraform, you do not have to tell it how to get from the infrastructure you have to the infrastructure you want, it just asks you what you want the world to look like, and then it deals with the details.
In other words, you can say that Terraform is innovative because it doesn't ask you how to get from your current infrastructure to your desired infrastructure. It just asks you what you want your world to look like and then does everything else.
Fig 1.1- Terraform |
You do not have to worry if you don't know how to write code. You can forget about classes and interfaces when it comes to writing Terraform code, which differs greatly from imperative code written in programming languages.
Code can instead be viewed as small blocks that represent something in the real world and then a set of properties for that resource to facilitate its configuration. The code represents a resource from the real world, and then it has properties that configure that resource.
All of these problems are solved by Terraform since your infrastructure is defined in code. Your infrastructure is represented by the code. Terraform will update your environment exactly as you specify it in your code when it runs against your code. There is no difference between any of your environments.
A computer data center's infrastructure is defined as a set of machine-readable definition files rather than by physical hardware configuration or interactive tools.
Terraform allows you to build, change, and version your infrastructure using code techniques. It will enable you to set configuration files to define your applications or infrastructure and store your infrastructure's state to modify or update.
Benefits of using Terraform
- AWS, Google Cloud, OpenStack and other cloud providers can all be described using one tool and one language. Switching providers is made easier.
- Amazon instances are capable of running Kubernetes containers with your workloads, allowing you to manage the whole system from one interface.
- There are several IaaS platforms handled by Terraform, including AWS and Azure, as well as PaaS platforms like SQL and NodeJS. Among the local variables that can be stored on the Terraform registry are cloud tokens and passwords encrypted.
- In Terraform, teams can collaborate on infrastructure through the Terraform registry (the central registry version control).