Introduction to Terraform and how it can fit within your workflow

Terraform is an amazing tool created by a company called Hashicorp that can automate your infrastructure at a level lower than Ansible, Puppet, or other configuration management solutions. In fact, Terraform typically doesn’t replace those but complements them. With configuration management tools, we generally have to create the initial server and set up the operating system first before we can implement them. With Ansible, there are actually methods of using it to create infrastructure components, but that’s beyond the scope of the book.

Not only that, but while Ansible is able to create some types of infrastructure, that’s not what it does best. To understand where something like Terraform fits, it’s best to think of Terraform as making things exist and Ansible as taking things that already exist and ensuring they’re configured properly.

When it comes to Terraform itself...