The Power of Terraform: Streamline Your Infrastructure Deployment Process with Infrastructure as Code
Why we use Terraform?
Terraform is a popular infrastructure as code (IaC) management tool. It enables you to declaratively describe and manage your infrastructure, making it simple to provide and manage resources across numerous cloud providers and on-premises settings.
Here are some of the reasons we utilise Terraform:
Infrastructure as code: Terraform enables you to specify your infrastructure as code, making it easier to maintain and version control.
Support for many cloud providers: Terraform supports numerous cloud providers, including AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and many others, allowing you to effortlessly supply resources across multiple clouds.
Resource dependencies: Terraform maintains resource dependencies automatically, ensuring that resources are produced in the proper sequence and thereby eliminating mistakes and downtime.
Plan and Apply: Terraform has a dry-run functionality that tells users what changes to their infrastructure will be made before they are applied, giving them more control and confidence when making changes.
Collaboration: Terraform allows several team members to cooperate on the same infrastructure codebase, allowing users to interact while minimising mistakes.
Overall Terraform is a robust and adaptable solution for managing infrastructure as code, allowing users to provide and manage resources across many cloud providers and environments while increasing productivity and minimising mistakes.
What is Infrastructure as Code (IaC)?
The practise of defining and maintaining IT infrastructure resources such as servers, networks, and storage as code in a version-controlled and declarative style is known as infrastructure as code (IaC). IaC allows users to describe infrastructure resources using a high-level language or a domain-specific language (DSL) rather than manually setting them. IaC offers various advantages, including: Version control allows users to manage changes, revert to earlier versions, and interact with team members by storing infrastructure code in version control.
Consistency: Infrastructure resources are built and configured using the same code across environments, ensuring consistency and decreasing configuration drift.
Automation: Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) allows customers to automate the creation, updating, and deletion of infrastructure resources, decreasing human work and enhancing efficiency.
Reusability: Infrastructure code may be modularized and reused across environments, which reduces duplication and simplifies maintenance.
What is Resource?
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) technologies such as Terraform, CloudFormation, or Ansible are commonly used to design and manage resources. These technologies allow users to construct infrastructure resources declaratively, expressing the resource's intended state rather than the sequence of activities to attain that state.
For example :
when using Terraform to define an EC2 instance on Amazon Web Services, the resource definition may include information such as the instance type, the number of instances to provision, the security groups to attach, and the instance metadata. Terraform would automatically generate, configure, and administer the resource depending on the stated configuration after the resource is definedIP addresses, security groups, disc space, and CPU utilisation are examples of characteristics that describe the qualities and behaviours of resources.
These qualities can be changed over time, and IaC tools can identify and update any changes to the resources to ensure they stay in the correct condition.
What is Provider?
A provider is a plugin or module that allows an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool to interface with and interact with a specific infrastructure platform or service. Providers enable IaC technologies like Terraform and CloudFormation to generate, configure, and manage resources across multiple cloud providers or on-premises settings. The Terraform AWS provider, for example, allows users to create, configure, and manage AWS resources such as EC2 instances, S3 buckets, and RDS instances. Similarly, Terraform's Azure provider allows users to handle Azure resources including virtual machines, storage accounts, and network interfaces.
Providers often abstract away the complexities of the underlying infrastructure platform and provide a common interface for managing resources. On behalf of the IaC tool, they manage login, API requests, and resource creation, setup, and deletion.
Users can select which provider to use when declaring resources in their code when using IaC tools, which often contain numerous providers for different infrastructure platforms. Users can additionally expand or customise providers to accommodate unique use cases or interact with customised infrastructure platforms or services.
Whats is State file in terraform? What’s the importance of it ?
The state file in Terraform is a JSON-formatted file that tracks the current status of the infrastructure resources described in the configuration files. It holds information such as resource metadata, dependencies, and resource linkages, as well as their current state and attribute values.
The state file is critical to the Terraform workflow because it allows the tool to comprehend the current status of the infrastructure resources and execute updates or modifications as needed. Terraform reads the state file and compares it to the desired state defined in the configuration files when it starts. It then builds, alters, or deletes resources as needed to bring the infrastructure back up to speed.
The state file also stores sensitive information such as passwords, access keys, and secrets needed to govern infrastructure resources. Terraform guarantees that this information is not saved in plain text in configuration files or scripts by saving it in the state file, limiting the danger of unintentional disclosure.
The state file is normally saved locally on the Terraform computer, but it may also be stored remotely through a remote state backend like Amazon S3, Azure Blob Storage, or HashiCorp Consul. Storing the state file remotely enables collaborative infrastructure management while also improving security through version control, access control, and audit trails.
What is Desired and Current State?
Desired state refers to the ideal or planned configuration of infrastructure resources described in configuration files in the context of Infrastructure as Code (IaC). It describes how the resources should be setup and the condition in which they should be.
In Terraform, for example, the intended state might be specified in the configuration files using declarative vocabulary that defines the infrastructure resources to be generated or managed. The intended state might comprise information such as the number and type of instances, storage volume size and configuration, network setup, and security rules.
The present state, on the other hand, refers to the actual configuration of the infrastructure resources at any particular moment in time. It is the state of the resources as defined and maintained by the IaC tool, depending on the configuration files' desired state.
In Terraform, for example, if the intended state is to construct two EC2 instances, the existing state is that there are no instances. The current state would represent the newly formed instances once Terraform applied the configuration files and produced the EC2 instances.
The IaC tool uses the desired state to determine what actions are needed to bring the current state of the infrastructure resources to the desired state. This process is known as a "plan," and it involves creating, modifying, or deleting resources as necessary to achieve the desired state.
