Getting started with terraform

What is Terraform -

                               Ok, so Terraform is Open-Source Infrastructure-as-Code(IAC) software tool which created by HashiCrop. The idea behind IAC is to define, deploy, update and destroy your infrastructure without any much difficulties. The main idea behind this is to treat everything as a code. No matter what it is. 

In this article, I am going in deep to explain about the software and compare this with other lots of available tool sets which together can be replaced this e.g. ansible, chef, puppet, salt, CloudFormation, ARM etc. 

In this specific article, I'll just show how easily we can launch a basic EC2 instance with a small code set. Terraform is simple binary which you can download and put that in your path. 

Below is the main architecture diagram which we are going to simulate.

Create a file "main.tf" where tf stands for teffaform. Add below code snippet to this file.

Set up your AWS credentials. Here for just testing you can set below variable with you AWS access and secret keys. There are other better ways to handle your credentials, but here I am just using these variable for testing.

$ export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=(your access key id)
$ export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=(your secret access key)

Next, step is to initialise the terraform, using $terraform init, reason for doing this is because when you specify the provider on the first line, terraform was not having specific plugins to do his job. So after this command it will actually generate a ".terraform" directory with all the required plugin for mentioned provider.

Output -

Next is to check if everything is correct before implementing the changes. You can use "$terraform plan" to check this as below:

Finally, Let apply these changes to launch the EC2 instance in AWS.

 Check AWS console for the instance availability: