Terraform Has a Free API — Infrastructure as Code That Actually Works

Terraform: The Industry Standard for Infrastructure as Code

Terraform by HashiCorp manages cloud infrastructure through code. AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, DNS, monitoring — 4000+ providers, one tool, one language (HCL).

Why Terraform

• Declarative — describe what you want, not how to get there
• Plan before apply — see changes before they happen
• State management — tracks real infrastructure
• Modules — reusable infrastructure components
• 4000+ providers — literally everything

The Free CLI API

# Initialize project
terraform init

# Preview changes
terraform plan

# Apply changes
terraform apply -auto-approve

# Show current state
terraform show

# Destroy infrastructure
terraform destroy

# Import existing resource
terraform import aws_instance.web i-1234567890

# Format code
terraform fmt

# Validate config
terraform validate

HCL Examples

# AWS EC2 instance
resource "aws_instance" "web" {
  ami           = "ami-0c55b159cbfafe1f0"
  instance_type = "t3.micro"

  tags = {
    Name = "web-server"
    Env  = "production"
  }
}

# Kubernetes deployment
resource "kubernetes_deployment" "app" {
  metadata {
    name = "my-app"
  }
  spec {
    replicas = 3
    selector {
      match_labels = { app = "my-app" }
    }
    template {
      metadata {
        labels = { app = "my-app" }
      }
      spec {
        container {
          image = "my-app:v1"
          name  = "my-app"
          port {
            container_port = 8080
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

# Variables
variable "region" {
  default = "us-east-1"
}

# Outputs
output "instance_ip" {
  value = aws_instance.web.public_ip
}

Modules

module "vpc" {
  source  = "terraform-aws-modules/vpc/aws"
  version = "5.0.0"

  name = "my-vpc"
  cidr = "10.0.0.0/16"
  azs  = ["us-east-1a", "us-east-1b"]
  private_subnets = ["10.0.1.0/24", "10.0.2.0/24"]
  public_subnets  = ["10.0.101.0/24", "10.0.102.0/24"]
}

Real-World Use Case

A startup managed AWS manually — 3 engineers, 2 days to set up a new environment. Terraform modules: one command creates VPC + EKS + RDS + monitoring. New environment in 15 minutes. Infrastructure changes reviewed in PR like code.

Quick Start

brew install terraform
terraform init
terraform plan

Resources

• GitHub
• Documentation
• Registry

---

Need automated infrastructure data? Check out my tools on Apify or email [e-mail] for custom IaC solutions.