Managing cloud resources and their configurations across functional environments can be difficult. Terraform — an open-source, Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) solution — can help, especially when combined with Development Operations (DevOps) automation.
In this post, I’ll cover some of the main questions our clients have about Terraform and how it can work with DevOps to simplify cloud migration automation and cloud infrastructure management. Together, they provide a solution that works without one-off scripts or manual configuration changes in any cloud environment, from Azure to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and beyond.
What Is IaC, and Why Does It Matter?
Organizations are beginning to use Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) to deploy infrastructure resources because of its vast customization capabilities. Using IaC as the primary deployment method allows you to configure, provision, and manage operational environments like any other application or code release. When paired with DevOps, IaC creates consistent environments for supporting your cloud infrastructure resources. Once you have consistent environments, you can place automation at every corner of your infrastructure lifecycle. Version control, continuous integration, monitoring, testing and more become possible when you successfully integrate IaC and DevOps. Critical infrastructure that supports production applications and systems become source controlled, and you can test and validate changes to infrastructure within lower environments first. Gone are the old management ways of one-off resource changes and inconsistent infrastructure configurations across environments. However, you need a strong DevOps culture within your organization for IaC to succeed because it puts the common policies and procedures in place that allow IaC to work. Before going further, let’s take a closer look at what DevOps is and how it ensures consistency.What Is DevOps?
If you are confused about what DevOps is, you are not alone. Googling the definition of DevOps will retrieve various answers, all of which will be at least partly accurate, depending on your needs at the time. So rather than giving a blanket definition of DevOps, I will instead illustrate what DevOps looks like in practice. Imagine your organization has a development team dedicated to pushing code changes to a critical application. Their whole responsibility is ensuring your team creates and manages the code and that it’s efficient and operational. Once the team creates a new feature or patch, they need to test the change to see if it will run smoothly in production. To do this, they package up their work and notify a separate operations team to implement the change and test it in a lower environment. If the changes and testing work, great! Your two teams have successfully validated a new feature or patch. However, what if the changes and testing don’t work? Because the teams are separate, a wall exists between them, and trust, code management and deployment can fall through the cracks. The two teams will blame each other, which results in little resolution. DevOps is the solution to this separation of teams, processes and ownership. It combines the development team and the operations team. The DevOps team works together, and all team members are part of the different processes. This integration provides many benefits, such as innovation acceleration, greater collaboration, enhanced security, and improved reliability, which can lead to drastically increased speed of development and deployment of products.Why Should I Use Terraform IaC?
Managing cloud infrastructure resources using IaC paired with DevOps begins with deciding which IaC toolset to use. Each has its pros and cons, but Terraform is a great middle-ground resource for organizations that want or need a consistent configuration method for managing multiple providers (Azure, AWS, Google, and so on). Terraform is a user-friendly, readable tool that enforces consistency across providers without users having to learn the specific templated languages and nuances of different cloud providers. Below are a few additional examples of the benefits Terraform can provide benefits to your organization:- Lower training costs for organizations who are using, or planning on using, multiple cloud providers.
- Easier file management. You can easily and efficiently pick up Terraform configuration and place these in different deployment methods.
- Secure backend management. Terraform tfstate files (files that map real-world resources to your configurations — see below) can be stored in different locations with limited access to ensure the security of backend management.
- Self-management of Terraform code repositories to avoid becoming locked-in with particular vendors.
- Increased consistency across infrastructure environments that leads to lower overhead, increased management, and more cost predictability.
- Faster deployments to market when you pair Terraform with DevOps practices.
Terraform at a High-Level (The Fundamentals)
Terraform contains two types of structures. The first is the repository (or repo), a hierarchical arrangement of files that contain the declarative Terraform code. The second is its branching for code management within the repository. The repo will hold all the terraform files and will contain any number of branches for IaC Management. Common Terraform elements include:- Modules – Self-contained packages of Terraform configurations that are managed as a group. Modules are reusable Terraform resource libraries and can be called upon to create/manage resources.
- Main.tf files – Core Terraform configuration files that instruct the resources that will be deployed and managed.
- *.tfvars files – Parameter variable files that allow for greater reusability of code
- variables.tf files– Input variable files that declare parameters to terraform configuration. This type of file provides alteration for the parameters in the terraform configuration file without altering the actual configuration file or hard coding information that can be varying. *.tfvars files can specify values listed in the variables.tf file.
- output.tf files – resources created within the main.tf file that can be output into a separate file to be referenced by other resources managed within other main.tf files
- *.tfstate files – Terraform uses state files to map real-world resources to your configuration, keep track of metadata, and improve performance for large infrastructures. You can store state files locally or in a remote storage location, such as an Azure Storage Account. However, you should store the *.tfstate files in a correlating storage container to prevent accidental deletion while improving team collaboration for managing terraform resources.
