Infrastructure as Code: Make Life Easier with Terraform

Most engineers with several years of infrastructure experience remember how complicated and time-consuming IT infrastructure management was. System administrators manually assembled servers in datacenters, attached network and storage, installed operating systems, and configured them based on team requirements. This manual process created numerous issues including human errors and inconsistent configurations across infrastructure elements.

The birth of automation

Engineers initially used scripts to achieve desired infrastructure states, marking the beginning of automation evolution. Virtualization technologies advancing from virtual machines to containers, combined with increased cloud-native and public cloud adoption, significantly changed infrastructure provisioning and management perspectives.

Infrastructure as code definition

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is fundamentally the automation of infrastructure provisioning and management using software development principles and practices. Code defining IT infrastructure is stored in version control systems, written, tested, and deployed like traditional software.

Automation arsenal

Multiple tools exist for infrastructure automation, including Puppet, Ansible, Azure Resource Manager, Chef, and SaltStack. The appropriate tool depends on your specific use case and goals - different tools suit infrastructure management, application installation, one-time configurations, and post-installation changes.

Quick look at Terraform

Terraform is a single Golang binary downloadable from Hashicorp's website. It operates through three stages: write (defining infrastructure in HCL), plan (generating execution plans), and apply (performing detected actions).

The state file tracks deployed resources, allowing Terraform to compare configurations with existing infrastructure. Workspaces provide independently managed, isolated state files - useful for proof-of-concepts, testing, multiple subscriptions, environments, regions, or locations.