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Getting Started with Terraform
Getting Started with Terraform

Getting Started with Terraform: Infrastructure automation made easy

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Profile Icon Kirill Shirinkin
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zł59.99 zł141.99
Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 2 (1 Ratings)
eBook Jan 2017 206 pages 1st Edition
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zł59.99 zł141.99
Paperback
zł177.99
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Arrow left icon
Profile Icon Kirill Shirinkin
Arrow right icon
zł59.99 zł141.99
Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 2 (1 Ratings)
eBook Jan 2017 206 pages 1st Edition
eBook
zł59.99 zł141.99
Paperback
zł177.99
Subscription
Free Trial
eBook
zł59.99 zł141.99
Paperback
zł177.99
Subscription
Free Trial

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Getting Started with Terraform

Chapter 1. Infrastructure Automation

Before starting to learn Terraform, you first need to learn certain concepts in the modern infrastructure. To be able to use the new tool, one needs to understand what problem it solves. In order to do it, this chapter will cover the following topics:

  • Learning what Infrastructure as Code is and why it is needed
  • Understanding the benefits of declarative approach for configuration management
  • Explaining the missing points of configuration management tools
  • Laying out requirements for high-level infrastructure automation
  • Taking a quick look at main tools in order to provision infrastructure
  • The short overview and history of Terraform
  • What you will learn in this book

What is Infrastructure as Code and why is it needed?

The amount of servers used by almost any project is growing rapidly mostly due to increasing adoption of cloud technologies. As a result, traditional ways of managing IT infrastructure become less and less relevant.

The manual approach fits well for the farm of a dozen, perhaps even a couple of dozens of servers. But when we're talking about hundreds of them, doing anything by hand is definitely not going to play out well.

It's not only about servers, of course. Every cloud provider gives extra services on top, be it a virtual networking service, an object storage, or a monitoring solution, which you don't need to maintain yourself. These services function like a Software as a Service (SaaS). And actually, we should treat various SaaS products as part of our infrastructure as well. If you use NewRelic for monitoring purposes, then it is your infrastructure too, with the difference that you don't need to manage servers for it yourself. But how you use it and whether you use it correctly is up to you.

No surprises, companies of any size, from small start-ups to huge enterprises, are adopting new techniques and tools to manage and automate their infrastructures. These techniques got a new name eventually: Infrastructure as Code (IaC).

Dated something around 2009, the Infrastructure as Code term is all about approaching your IT-infrastructure tasks the same way you develop software. This includes the things similar to the following:

  • Heavy use of source control to store all infrastructure-related code
  • Collaboration on this code in the same fashion as applications are developed
  • Using Unit and Integration testing and even applying Test-driven development to infrastructure code
  • Introducing Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery to test and release infrastructure code

Infrastructure as Code is a foundation for DevOps culture because once both operations and developers approach their work in the same way and by following principles laid out preceding, they already have some common ground.

Not saying that if your infrastructure is treated like code, then the border between development and operations becomes so blurry that the whole existence of this separation can become eventually quite questionable.

Of course, the introduction of Infrastructure as Code requires a new kind of tools.

Declarative vs Procedural tools for Infrastructure as Code

What is infrastructure code specifically? It highly depends on your particular infrastructure setup.

In the simplest case, it might be just a bunch of shell scripts and component-specific configuration files (Nginx configuration, cron jobs, and so on) stored in source control. Inside these shell scripts, you specify exact steps computer needs to take to achieve the state you need:

  1. Copy this file to that folder.
  2. Replace all occurrences of ADDRESS with mysite.com.
  3. Restart the Nginx service.
  4. Send an e-mail about successful deployment.

This is what we call procedural programming. It's not bad. For example, build steps of Continuous Integration tools such as Jenkins that are a perfect fit for a procedural approach—after all the sequence of command is exactly what you need in this case. 

However, you can only go that far with shell scripts when it comes to configuring servers and higher level pieces. The more common and mature approach these days is to use tools that provide a declarative, rather than a procedural way to define your infrastructure. With declarative definitions, you don't need to think how to do something; you only write what should be there.

Perhaps the main benefit of it is that rerunning a declarative definition will never do the same job twice, whereas executing the same shell script will most likely break something on the second run. Proper configuration management tool will ensure that the server will be in the exactly same state as defined in your code. This property of modern configuration and provisioning tools is named idempotency.

Let's look at an example. Let's say that you have a box in your network that hosts packages repository. For some reason, instead of using DNS server, you want to hardcode the IP address of this box to the  /etc/hosts file with a domain name repository.internal.

Note

In Unix-like systems, the  /etc/hosts file contains a local text database of DNS records. The system tries to resolve DNS name by looking at this file first, and only asking DNS-server only after.

Not a complex task to do, given that you only need to add a new line to the  /etc/hosts file. To achieve this, you could have a script like the following:

echo 192.168.0.5 repository.internal >> /etc/hosts/hosts

Running it once will do the job: required entry will be added to the end of the /etc/hosts file. But what will happen if you execute it again? You guessed it right: exactly the same line will be appended again. And even worse, what if the IP address of repository box will change? Then, if you execute your script, you will end up with two different host entries for the same domain name.

You can ensure idempotency yourself inside the script, with the high usage of conditional checks. But why reinvent the wheel when there is already a tool to do exactly this job? It would be so much better to just define the end result, without composing sequence of commands to achieve this.

And that is exactly what configuration management tools such as Puppet and Chef do by providing you a special Domain Specific Language (DSL) for defining the desired state of the machine. The certain downside is the necessity to learn a new DSL: a special small language focused on solving one particular task. It's not a complete programming language, neither does it to be; in this case, its only job is to describe the state of your server.

Let's look at how the same task could be done with the help of a Puppet manifest:

host { 'repository.internal': 
  ip => '192.168.0.5', 
} 

Applying this manifest multiple times will never add extra entries, and changing the IP address in the manifest will be reflected correctly in host files changing the existing entry, and not creating a new one.

Note

There is an additional benefit I should mention: on top of idempotency, you often get platform agnosticism. What it means is that the same definition could be used for completely different operating systems without any change. For example, by using package resource in Puppet, you don't care whether the underlying system uses rpm or deb.

Now you should better understand that when it comes to configuration management tools that provide the declarative way of doing things are preferred.

Modern configuration management tools such as Chef or Puppet completely solved the problem of setting up a single machine. There is an increasing number of high-quality libraries (be it cookbooks or modules) for configuring all kinds of software in an (almost) OS-agnostic way. But configuring what goes inside single server is only part of the picture. The other part that is located a layer above also requires a new tooling.

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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 production infrastructure. It can manage 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 complete management of infrastructure with Terraform, starting with the basics of using providers and resources. This book 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. It finishes with the complete workflow of managing a production infrastructure as code – this is achieved with the help of version control and continuous integration. At the end of this book, you will be familiar with advanced techniques such as multi-provider support and multiple remote modules.

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 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 : Jan 31, 2017
Length: 206 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781786468802
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Product Details

Publication date : Jan 31, 2017
Length: 206 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781786468802
Languages :
Tools :

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Table of Contents

8 Chapters
1. Infrastructure Automation Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
2. Deploying First Server Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
3. Resource Dependencies and Modules Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
4. Storing and Supplying Configuration Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
5. Connecting with Other Tools Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
6. Scaling and Updating Infrastructure Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
7. Collaborative Infrastructure Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
8. Future of Terraform Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Customer reviews

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One of those technical books which although possibly technically competent, is so jarring in it's use of English, that it is difficult to read. I suspect that English is not the author's first language, which would account for the eccentric use of articles. This may sound picky, but I find it hard to read "Create EC2 instance" rather than "Creating an EC2 instance". The writing isn't even consistent; there'll be an article one time and not another. Very frustrating as it distracts from the sense of the book.
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