Terraform - Basics
Terraform ❤️
Terraform is an open-source tool to describe/provision infrastructure as code. It offers you HCL (HashiCorp Configuration Language) to describe that infrastructure you would like to have.
It works with most of the cloud providers out there and even on on-prem data centers.
Terraform concentrates on server provisioning leaving software to Docker or Packer.
Terraform can automate and manage Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), or even Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) level capabilities and build all these resources across all those providers in parallel.
Providers
A provider is responsible for understanding the API interactions with some kind of service and exposing resources based on that API.
Some of the already built-in providers offered by Terraform:
- IaaS: AWS, GCP, Zure, OpenStack.
- PaaS: Heroku
- SaaS: Terraform Cloud, DNSimple, Cloudfare
There are many other providers and it is also possible to have a custom-build provider as well.
Links
Folder Structure and best practices
Since your infra and code can grow very fast it is a good practice to split resources into files in which each file is responsible to configure/create one or more resource type.