The growing demand in business today has led to a cultural shift known as DevOps. This approach highlights the importance of collaboration and communication between software developers and IT operations teams, while also automating software delivery and infrastructure changes.
The days of manually configuring hundreds of servers, networks, and firewall rules through a user interface are behind us. With Infrastructure as Code (IAC), you need to specify the desired end state of your infrastructure. IAC tools will then automatically provision the infrastructure for you.
Terraform is an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool developed by HashiCorp that enables users to provision Google Cloud resources using declarative configuration files. With Terraform, you can manage various Google Cloud resources, including virtual machines, containers, storage, and networking. It allows you to express your infrastructure as code in a straightforward and human-readable language known as HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL).
The Configuration Workflow includes:
👉 Author - Author the configuration files based on the scope.
👉 Initialize - Download the provider plugins and initialize the directory.
👉 Plan - View execution plan for resources created, modified, or destroyed.
👉 Apply - Create actual infrastructure resources.
Use Terraform for Google Cloud to:
✅ Provision resources, which means you can use resource blocks to define infrastructure elements such as VMs, network, and firewall resources.
✅ Create resource dependencies: You can create explicit dependencies between resources so that a given resource can only be created after the creation of another resource.
✅ Standardize configurations: You can standardize how a given resource is created by creating modules.
✅ Validate inputs to resource arguments: You can limit the values that a user can provide for a given resource argument using validation rules within Terraform.
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