Terraforming the infrastructure

Devops

• no flakey services
• version control of infra structure
• automation

Terraform benefits

• bird's eye view of the infrastructure
• track changes
• easily setup multiple environments from single infrastructure definition
• maintain multicloud and/or on-premise infrastructure
• track the state of infrastructure - file, s3, consul
  • resource based locking allows multipe users to make changes to the infrastructure without affecting each other.

Terraform components and features

• HCL syntax based files
  • string interpolation
  • input and output variables
    • passed from commandline
    • tfvars file
• Providers
  • AWS, DigiOcean, F5, Azure, vSphere
  • multi provider support
• Resources
  • machines, loadbalancers, etc
• Data blocks
  • fetch data from providers
• States
  • shared
  • tracked
• Provisioners for VMs
  • act on resource after it's created
  • chef support is builtin
  • run bash scripts on remote machine or local
    • trigger ansible locally to continue setting up the machine
  • runs only on new VMs (tainting the infrastructure allows you to recreate)
• Parallel provisioning
• Secure
  • keys and other sensitive data can be stored in Vault

Demo

• providers & resources & output variables
• provisioners
• create index.html template page
• use file provisioning to deploy different index.html pages on the servers
• setup loadbalancer / setup distributed dns

Notes

1. digital ocean images ubuntu-16-04-x64
2. digital ocean DCs - ams2, ams3, lon1, fra1

Demo 1

1. setup tf file with digital ocean
2. create droplet
3. add ssh key
4. add output variable to show IP Addresses
5. logon using ssh
6. create multiple machines