Infrastructure as Code tool that helps automate the provisioning and management of infrastructure across multiple cloud providers..

Why Use Terraform?

Terraform is a product by HashiCorp and is vendor-neutral.
It is mainly used to provision resources in the cloud, such as AWS, GCP, Azure, and more.

In the real world, setting up a 3-tier application can take hours to install, provision, and troubleshoot for an environment, like a development environment. The same process applies to other environments like SIT, UAT, performance, production, and DR.

There is a high chance of configuration drift, human errors, or inconsistent builds. It's also a time-consuming process if we need to build for hundreds of applications.

To save time, prevent configuration drift, and reduce human errors, we use Terraform to automate the provisioning, modification, and better management of AWS resources.

How Does It Work?

Terraform works by using providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP, and their respective APIs to communicate with their services to provision, modify, or destroy resources.

We write Terraform code in .tf files and run Terraform commands to initialize, plan, and apply.

Terraform calls AWS APIs and executes or provisions based on the code written.

Architecture of Terraform:

Terraform Workflow:

Commands:

terraform init :Initialize the working directory

terraform validate :Validates the configuration files

terraform plan : Creates an execution plan or dry run

terraform apply:Apply the changes to desired state

terraform destroy:Destroy the infrastructure

Installation:

Steps to install Terraform:

Windows:

1. Ensure you have Chocolatey installed on your Windows machine.

2. Open PowerShell and run choco install terraform.

   https://spacelift.io/blog/how-to-install-terraform#how-to-install-terraform-on-windows-using-chocolatey

3. Verify the installation by running terraform -version.