Terraform

• Terraform helps in IaC (Infrastructure as Code)
• From Terraform, Infrastructure can be created in almost all the virtual environments (AWS, Azure, VmWare, VirtualBox etc)
• Terraform is developed in GO Language.
• Like Packer, Terraform is also a single executable.
• Terraform templates are written in Custom DSL. This DSL mostly looks like JSON.
• Terraform templates end with .tf extension

Installation

• Windows:
  • choco install terraform
• Linux:
  • Download the terraform from here
  • unzip the file to some folder. Add this folder to PATH environment variable (use export command and add this statement to /etc/environment or .bashrc)

Terraform in CD Pipelines (DevOps)

Concepts

• Terraform has list of providers supported. Each Provider provides resources and data sources.
• Provider: Provider is used to create infrastructure in particular virtual environments. Refer Here for the complete list. Some of the popular providers are
  • AWS
  • Azure
  • OpenStack
  • VmWare
• Resource: Resource is part of the infrastructure create on the provider. Every Provider provides resources.
• DataSource: <will be defining soon. not now>
• Variables: To give options for the user to enter different values to resources.
• Provisioners: Terraform supports various provisioners like shell, Chef, Powershell