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Getting Started with Terraform
Getting Started with Terraform

Getting Started with Terraform: Manage production infrastructure as a code , Second Edition

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Profile Icon Kirill Shirinkin
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Paperback Jul 2017 208 pages 2nd Edition
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Arrow left icon
Profile Icon Kirill Shirinkin
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Full star icon Full star icon Half star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 2.7 (3 Ratings)
Paperback Jul 2017 208 pages 2nd Edition
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$17.99 $25.99
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Getting Started with Terraform

Deploying First Server

Now that we know which problem Terraform solves, we can proceed to learning how exactly it works and how to use it. In this chapter, we will learn a bit about Terraform's history, install it on our workstation, prepare our working environment, and run the tool for the first time. After getting everything ready for our work, we will figure out what a Terraform provider is, and then we will take a quick tour of what AWS and EC2 are.

With this knowledge in place, we will first create an EC2 instance by hand (just to understand the pain that Terraform will eliminate), and then we will do exactly the same with the help of the Terraform template. That will allow us to study the nature of the Terraform state file. Once we know that, we will update our server using the same template, and finally, destroy it. By the end of the chapter, you will already have...

History of Terraform

Terraform was first released in July 2014 by a company named HashiCorp. It is the same company that brought us tool, such as Vagrant, Packer, and Vault. Being the fifth tool in the HashiCorp stack, it focused on providing a way to describe the complete infrastructure as code:

... From physical servers to containers to SaaS products, Terraform is able to create and compose all the components necessary to run any service or application. With Terraform, you describe your complete infrastructure as code, even as it spans multiple service providers. Your servers may come from AWS, your DNS may come from CloudFlare, and your database may come from Heroku. Terraform will build all these resources across all these providers in parallel. Terraform codifies knowledge about your infrastructure unlike any other tool before, and provides the workflow and tooling for safely...

Preparing work environment

In this book, we will focus on using Terraform in a Linux environment. The general usage of the tool should be the same on all platforms, though some advanced topics and practices discussed in later chapters might apply only to Linux systems.

As mentioned in the previous section, Terraform is distributed as a single binary, packaged inside a ZIP archive. Unfortunately, HashiCorp does not provide native packages for operating systems. That means the first step is to install unzip. Depending on your package manager, this could be done by running sudo yum install unzip, or sudo apt-get install unzip or it might even already be installed. In any case, after making sure that you can unarchive the ZIP files, proceed to downloading Terraform from the official website, https://www.terraform.io/downloads.html.

Unzip it to any convenient folder. Make sure that...

The many Terraform providers

Providers are something you use to configure access to the service you create resources for. For example, if you want to create AWS resources, you need to configure the AWS provider. This would specify credentials to access the APIs of many AWS services.

At the time of writing, Terraform has more than 40 providers. This impressive list includes not only major cloud providers such as AWS and Google Cloud, but also smaller services, such as Fastly, a Content Delivery Network (CDN) provider.

Not every provider requires explicit configuration. Some of them do not even deal with external services. Instead, they provide resources for local entities. For example, you could use a TLS provider to generate keys and certificates.

Nevertheless, most providers deal with one or another external API and require configuration. In this book, we will be using the AWS...

Short introduction to AWS

Amazon Web Services is a cloud offering from Amazon, an online retail giant. Back in the early 2000s, Amazon invested money in an automated platform, which would provide services for things such as network, storage, and computation to Amazon developers. Developers then didn't need to manage underlying the infrastructure. Instead, they would use provided services via APIs to provision virtual machines, storage buckets, and so on.

The platform, initially built to power Amazon itself, was open for public usage in 2006. The first released service was Simple Queue Service (SQS), followed by the two most commonly used AWS services--Simple Storage Service (S3) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) were released and anyone could pay to use them.

Fast forward 10 years. AWS now has over 70 different services, covering practically everything a modern infrastructure...

Using Elastic Compute Cloud

We will look at three ways of creating an EC2 instance: manually via the Management Console, with the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), and with Terraform.

Creating an instance through the Management Console

Just to get a feel of the AWS Management Console and to fully understand how much Terraform simplifies working with AWS, let's create a single EC2 instance manually:

  1. Log in to the console and choose EC2 from the list of services:
  1. Click on Launch Instance:
  1. Choose AWS Marketplace from the left sidebar, type Centos in the search box, and click on the Select button for the first search result:
  1. On each of the next pages, just click on Next till you reach the end of the process and...

Configuring AWS provider

Before using Terraform to create an instance, we need to configure AWS provider. This is the first piece of code we will write in our template. Templates are written in a special language named HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL). More details about HCL can be found at https://github.com/hashicorp/hcl. You can also write your templates in JSON, but this is recommended only if a template is itself generated or read by a machine.

We can configure credentials in the following ways.

Static credentials

With this method, you just hardcode your access keys right inside your template. It looks as follows:

    provider "aws" {
        access_key = "xxxxxxxxxxxxx"
        secret_key =...

History of Terraform


Terraform was first released in July 2014 by a company named HashiCorp. It is the same company that brought us tool, such as Vagrant, Packer, and Vault. Being the fifth tool in the HashiCorp stack, it focused on providing a way to describe the complete infrastructure as code:

... From physical servers to containers to SaaS products, Terraform is able to create and compose all the components necessary to run any service or application. With Terraform, you describe your complete infrastructure as code, even as it spans multiple service providers. Your servers may come from AWS, your DNS may come from CloudFlare, and your database may come from Heroku. Terraform will build all these resources across all these providers in parallel. Terraform codifies knowledge about your infrastructure unlike any other tool before, and provides the workflow and tooling for safely changing and updating infrastructure. - https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/terraform.html

Terraform is an open source...

Preparing work environment


In this book, we will focus on using Terraform in a Linux environment. The general usage of the tool should be the same on all platforms, though some advanced topics and practices discussed in later chapters might apply only to Linux systems.

As mentioned in the previous section, Terraform is distributed as a single binary, packaged inside a ZIP archive. Unfortunately, HashiCorp does not provide native packages for operating systems. That means the first step is to install unzip. Depending on your package manager, this could be done by running sudo yum install unzip, or sudo apt-get install unzip or it might even already be installed. In any case, after making sure that you can unarchive the ZIP files, proceed to downloading Terraform from the official website, https://www.terraform.io/downloads.html.

Unzip it to any convenient folder. Make sure that this folder is available in your PATH environment variable. A full installation command sequence could look as follows...

The many Terraform providers


Providers are something you use to configure access to the service you create resources for. For example, if you want to create AWS resources, you need to configure the AWS provider. This would specify credentials to access the APIs of many AWS services.

At the time of writing, Terraform has more than 40 providers. This impressive list includes not only major cloud providers such as AWS and Google Cloud, but also smaller services, such as Fastly, a Content Delivery Network (CDN) provider.

Not every provider requires explicit configuration. Some of them do not even deal with external services. Instead, they provide resources for local entities. For example, you could use a TLS provider to generate keys and certificates.

Nevertheless, most providers deal with one or another external API and require configuration. In this book, we will be using the AWS provider. Before we configure it, let's have a short introduction to AWS. If you are already familiar with this platform...

Short introduction to AWS


Amazon Web Services is a cloud offering from Amazon, an online retail giant. Back in the early 2000s, Amazon invested money in an automated platform, which would provide services for things such as network, storage, and computation to Amazon developers. Developers then didn't need to manage underlying the infrastructure. Instead, they would use provided services via APIs to provision virtual machines, storage buckets, and so on.

The platform, initially built to power Amazon itself, was open for public usage in 2006. The first released service was Simple Queue Service (SQS), followed by the two most commonly used AWS services--Simple Storage Service (S3) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) were released and anyone could pay to use them.

Fast forward 10 years. AWS now has over 70 different services, covering practically everything a modern infrastructure would need. It has services for virtual networking, queue processing, transactional emails, storage, DNS, relational...

Using Elastic Compute Cloud


We will look at three ways of creating an EC2 instance: manually via the Management Console, with the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), and with Terraform.

Creating an instance through the Management Console

Just to get a feel of the AWS Management Console and to fully understand how much Terraform simplifies working with AWS, let's create a single EC2 instance manually:

  1. Log in to the console and choose EC2 from the list of services:
  1. Click on Launch Instance:
  1. Choose AWS Marketplace from the left sidebar, type Centos in the search box, and click on the Select button for the first search result:
  1. On each of the next pages, just click on Next till you reach the end of the process and you get a notification as follows:

As you see, it's not really a quick process to create a single virtual server on EC2. You have to choose an AMI, an instance type, configure network details and permissions, select or generate an SSH key, properly tag it, pick the right security groups, and...

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Key benefits

  • An up-to-date and comprehensive resource on Terraform that lets you quickly and efficiently launch your infrastructure
  • Learn how to implement your infrastructure as code and make secure, effective changes to your infrastructure
  • Learn to build multi-cloud fault-tolerant systems and simplify the management and orchestration of even the largest scale and most complex cloud infrastructures

Description

Terraform is a tool used to efficiently build, configure, and improve the production infrastructure. It can manage the existing infrastructure as well as create custom in-house solutions. This book shows you when and how to implement infrastructure as a code practices with Terraform. It covers everything necessary to set up the complete management of infrastructure with Terraform, starting with the basics of using providers and resources. It is a comprehensive guide that begins with very small infrastructure templates and takes you all the way to managing complex systems, all using concrete examples that evolve over the course of the book. The book ends with the complete workflow of managing a production infrastructure as code—this is achieved with the help of version control and continuous integration. The readers will also learn how to combine multiple providers in a single template and manage different code bases with many complex modules. It focuses on how to set up continuous integration for the infrastructure code. The readers will be able to use Terraform to build, change, and combine infrastructure safely and efficiently.

Who is this book for?

This book is for developers and operators who already have some exposure to working with infrastructure but want to improve their workflow and introduce infrastructure as a code practice. Knowledge of essential Amazon Web Services components (EC2, VPC, IAM) would help contextualize the examples provided. Basic understanding of Jenkins and Shell scripts will be helpful for the chapters on the production usage of Terraform.

What you will learn

  • Understand what Infrastructure as Code (IaC) means and why it matters
  • Install, configure, and deploy Terraform
  • Take full control of your infrastructure in the form of code
  • Manage complete infrastructure, starting with a single server and scaling beyond any limits
  • Discover a great set of production-ready practices to manage infrastructure
  • Set up CI/CD pipelines to test and deliver Terraform stacks
  • Construct templates to simplify more complex provisioning tasks

Product Details

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Publication date, Length, Edition, Language, ISBN-13
Publication date : Jul 31, 2017
Length: 208 pages
Edition : 2nd
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781788623537
Vendor :
HashiCorp
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Product Details

Publication date : Jul 31, 2017
Length: 208 pages
Edition : 2nd
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781788623537
Vendor :
HashiCorp
Languages :
Tools :

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Table of Contents

8 Chapters
Infrastructure Automation Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Deploying First Server Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Resource Dependencies and Modules Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Storing and Supplying Configuration Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Connecting with Other Tools Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Scaling and Updating Infrastructure Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Collaborative Infrastructure Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Future of Terraform Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Customer reviews

Rating distribution
Full star icon Full star icon Half star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 2.7
(3 Ratings)
5 star 33.3%
4 star 0%
3 star 0%
2 star 33.3%
1 star 33.3%
speedyboy Sep 29, 2018
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
Excellent book for getting started with Terraform, especially if you're interested in using it with AWS.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
M C Sep 29, 2018
Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 2
Written in broken English and already outdated
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Graydon Apr 05, 2024
Full star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 1
Does anyone ever proof-read anymore? Preface: "By the end of this book not only will you now how to use Terraform" NOT "now", you wanted to say "know".
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