The purpose of Terraform for your organization is to provide a flexible and reliable platform for managing infrastructure. Terraform provides the ability to create, change, and destroy infrastructure quickly and easily, while keeping track of the changes and ensuring that the infrastructure is always in a state that meets your organization’s requirements.
In this guide we will cover the purpose of terraform and why its beneficial to learn and use for your business.
What is Terraform
In order to automate numerous infrastructure activities, DevOps teams frequently use the IAC tool Terraform. One of the primary use cases for Terraform is the provisioning of cloud resources, for example. It is an open-source, cloud-independent provisioning tool made by HashiCorp in the Go programming language.
You can use Terraform to write code to describe your entire infrastructure. Terraform enables you to create and manage these resources in parallel across providers, regardless of whether your servers are from the same provider or from various ones, like AWS or Azure. You may use Terraform as a single language and connective tissue to manage your complete IT stack.
What is the purpose of Terraform
The provisioning of public clouds on one of the major providers is one of Terraform’s primary uses. The primary goal of Terraform has been, and will continue to be, providing an IaC for services like AWS and Azure. Through a provider, a plugin that wraps already-existing APIs and languages like Azure Bicep, and the creation of Terraform syntax, Terraform makes it possible to leverage these public clouds.
Terraform’s second primary function is to make multi-cloud deployments easier. Contrary to some of its other IaC competitors, Terraform performs across all cloud providers simultaneously, which is one of its primary selling points. Engineers may use the same syntax without having to become familiar with a variety of tools and technologies thanks to the flexibility to deploy resources into multiple cloud providers.
Deploying, maintaining, and orchestrating resources with customized cloud providers is the third most frequent application of Terraform. If you’re not utilizing AWS or another popular cloud service, you may still wrap an existing API with Terraform and convert it to its declarative syntax by using a provider. Additionally, providers can be created for internal use cases in which you want to translate pre-existing tools or APIs into Terraform.
Infrastructure-as-Code Advantages (IaC)
IaC substitutes lines of code for the manual labor and standard operating procedures needed to manage IT resources. IaC uses source code to automate infrastructure management rather than manually configuring cloud nodes or physical hardware.
The purpose of of Terraform in an organization brings these key benefits:
- Simple and quick. The delivery and management lifecycles are accelerated by IaC by getting rid of manual processes. By only executing a script, IaC enables the creation of a comprehensive infrastructure design.
- Group cooperation. Through technologies like Github, many team members can work on IaC software in the same way they would with traditional application code. For future usage and reference, it is simple to link code to issue tracking systems.
- Error Control. The likelihood of mistakes or deviations is reduced while establishing your infrastructure with IaC. Your configuration is totally standardized by the code, enabling applications to operate faultlessly and without the need for ongoing administrative control.
- Recovery. You may really recover from disasters more quickly with IaC. Manually rebuilt infrastructure must be manually constructed. But with IaC, you can typically just execute the same scripts again to provision the same software.
How Terraform Works
Core terraform consists of three stages which makes it really easy to work with:
Terraform Core
- First you must identify resources, which could be spread out over several cloud services and providers. As an example, you could configure security groups and a load balancer to deploy an application on virtual machines in your AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) network.
- Then based on the existing infrastructure and your setup, Terraform generates an execution plan outlining the infrastructure it will create, update, or delete.
- Finally after your approval, terraform executes the suggested operations correctly and with consideration for any resource dependencies. For instance, Terraform will recreate the VPC before scaling the virtual machines if you modify the characteristics of a VPC and alter the number of virtual machines in that VPC.
Terraform Providers
The second essential element that powers Terraform are the suppliers of particular technology. This usually refers to cloud service providers like AWS or Azure, though it could also refer to any other infrastructure or platform as a service tool. For example, Kubernetes would also be regarded as a provider that Terraform makes use of.
This is how Terraform operates; it uses the functionality of both Core and Provider to swiftly setup your application and infrastructure using only code.
Conclusion
Terraform is continuing to become a tool amongst many IT groups. Taking the time to learn terraform can help boost your marketability when searching for a job. Although many organizations may not expect you to be an expert, learning the basics can help prevent disasters to companies resources.
Going through these tutorials can help you gain knowledge that can be used immediately in many organizations. The purpose of terraform is to help not only you but the organization you work for to continue to be agile and move quick.
