terraform-readme.md

Terraform

Overview

Cloud agnostic tool that is compatible with any cloud infrastructure and can be moved to and from different cloud environments without any operational issues - Terraform by HashiCorp is an infrastructure as code (IaC) open-source software.

Terraform components

Terraform is built on top of Go language. Terraform files are written using Hashicorp Configuration Language (HCL) which is similar to YAML.

Using Terraform language has following main components

1. Providers - plugin that enables interaction with an API, e.g. Azure Cloud provider
2. Variables - Just like code, parameters for a Terraform module
3. Resources - Infrastructure objects
4. State - stores metadata about the managed infrastructure & configuration

Terraform commands

• init - download dependencies (modules and providers)

  module - think of it as function in terms of code i.e. reuse resource configurations with Terraform. It consists of input variables, output variables & resources. As a standard best practice, modules are created under a separate directory modules/

• plan - show expected outcome of the code
• apply - execute the instructions, create the infrastructure resources
• destroy - remove all the resources associated with this deployment

How Terraform works?

References

• Terraform basics