1_terraform_overview.md

Terraform Overview

Video

Concepts

Introduction

1. What is Terraform?
   • open-source tool by HashiCorp, used for provisioning infrastructure resources
   • supports DevOps best practices for change management
   • Managing configuration files in source control to maintain an ideal provisioning state for testing and production environments
2. What is IaC?
   • Infrastructure-as-Code
   • build, change, and manage your infrastructure in a safe, consistent, and repeatable way by defining resource configurations that you can version, reuse, and share.
3. Some advantages
   • Infrastructure lifecycle management
   • Version control commits
   • Very useful for stack-based deployments, and with cloud providers such as AWS, GCP, Azure, K8S…
   • State-based approach to track resource changes throughout deployments

Files

• main.tf
• variables.tf
• Optional: resources.tf, output.tf
• .tfstate

Declarations

• terraform: configure basic Terraform settings to provision your infrastructure
  • required_version: minimum Terraform version to apply to your configuration
  • backend: stores Terraform's "state" snapshots, to map real-world resources to your configuration.
    • local: stores state file locally as terraform.tfstate
  • required_providers: specifies the providers required by the current module
• provider:
  • adds a set of resource types and/or data sources that Terraform can manage
  • The Terraform Registry is the main directory of publicly available providers from most major infrastructure platforms.
• resource
  • blocks to define components of your infrastructure
  • Project modules/resources: google_storage_bucket, google_bigquery_dataset, google_bigquery_table
• variable & locals
  • runtime arguments and constants

Execution steps

1. terraform init:
   • Initializes & configures the backend, installs plugins/providers, & checks out an existing configuration from a version control
2. terraform plan:
   • Matches/previews local changes against a remote state, and proposes an Execution Plan.
3. terraform apply:
   • Asks for approval to the proposed plan, and applies changes to cloud
4. terraform destroy
   • Removes your stack from the Cloud

Terraform Workshop to create GCP Infra

Continue here: week_1_basics_n_setup/1_terraform_gcp/terraform

References

https://learn.hashicorp.com/collections/terraform/gcp-get-started