Getting Started with Terraform

Terraform is an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool by HashiCorp that lets you define and provision infrastructure using a declarative configuration language (HCL).

Why Terraform?

• Cloud-agnostic - Works with AWS, GCP, Azure, and hundreds of providers
• State management - Tracks what’s deployed via a state file
• Plan before apply - See what will change before it happens

Basic Concepts

Providers

Providers are plugins that let Terraform talk to APIs:

terraform {
  required_providers {
    aws = {
      source  = "hashicorp/aws"
      version = "~> 5.0"
    }
  }
}

provider "aws" {
  region = "eu-west-1"
}

Resources

Resources are the things you want to create:

resource "aws_s3_bucket" "my_bucket" {
  bucket = "my-unique-bucket-name"
}

The Workflow

terraform init    # Download providers
terraform plan    # Preview changes
terraform apply   # Apply changes
terraform destroy # Tear it all down

More Terraform posts coming.

• Terraform
• Infrastructure-as-Code
• Devops