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March 29, 2022
Terraform is an open-source tool created by HashiCorp that is used for building, changing, and versioning infrastructure. It is a tool for Infrastructure as Code (IaC), which means that it allows developers and operations teams to automate the process of provisioning and managing infrastructure using code. Terragrunt is a thin wrapper around Terraform that provides extra tools for easier-to-manage structure configurations.
Terraform is a popular tool for implementing IaC because it allows teams to define their infrastructure in a high-level, declarative language that abstracts away the underlying details of the infrastructure provider's API. This means that teams can use the same Terraform code to provision infrastructure across multiple cloud providers, on-premises data centers, or other third-party services while maintaining a consistent and standardized approach to infrastructure management.
In simple terms, if you want to provision an EC2 instance in AWS, you can write a terraform configuration to automate this process rather than doing it manually from the AWS console.
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This is a complete sample configuration that you can deploy with Terraform
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) refers to the practice of defining and managing infrastructure using code. It is a software engineering approach to IT infrastructure management that involves writing code to automate the provisioning and configuration of infrastructure resources, such as servers, networks, and storage.
The idea behind IaC is to treat infrastructure as if it were software, with the same version control, testing, and deployment processes. This approach allows infrastructure to be managed more efficiently and with greater agility, making it easier to scale and adapt to changing business needs.
Some popular tools for implementing IaC include Terraform, Ansible, Chef, Puppet, and CloudFormation.
In the Terraform Registry, you may find providers for many of the platforms and services you already use, and can create your own as well. It makes it also easy to re-use configurations for similar infrastructures (AWS, GCP, Azure, DO, …).
Terraform keeps track of your real infrastructure in a , which acts as a source of truth for your environment. It previews what changes will be applied, or what resources would be deleted/replaced before you apply it so can easily detect mistakes.
Terraform supports reusable configuration components called that allow us to treat our infrastructure as a piece of software that can be written once and used multiple times. This makes life much easier because now we can reuse the code that is written once
Use tried-and-true techniques in the infrastructure field, such as version control, modular development, testing, etc.
Overall, using IaC and tools like Terraform can help teams simplify and streamline their infrastructure management processes, reduce errors and inconsistencies, and enable greater agility and scalability as their infrastructure needs evolve over time
