Overview of Terraform

Most companies are transitioning into the cloud and therefore basing their critical applications on cloud infrastructure. When making this transition, companies need to rely on the whole development cycle, meaning that they rely on more than one environment in most cases. The importance of keeping a standardised and uniformed infrastructure throughout multiple environments is key. Without the right tools and approaches, cloud infrastructures can easily become complicated to manage and maintain. Terraform is a powerful infrastructure as code tool which facilitates the provisioning of cloud infrastructure by allowing you to create, update and version control the cloud infrastructure components. Deployment plans can be generated to understand the impact of changes and then executed via Terraform to transition the infrastructure to the desired end state. Terraform brings many benefits such as the facility to deploy most cloud components, the ability to parameterise deployments, the ability to source control the infrastructure configuration, the ability to reuse templates in order to standardise resource deployments and the ability to redeploy infrastructure on demand. Terraform can also be integrated with CI/CD pipelines to provide an end to end DevOps solution. In this session we will provide an overview of Terraform, covering the basics of how Terraform functions and the stages involved within a cycle. Any cloud infrastructure should be supported by a proper deployment tool such as Terraform - and hence this session will be useful for anyone looking to build or maintain a production-ready solution. This session is aimed at anybody who is interested in automating deployments to the cloud and as such no prior Terraform knowledge is required.