I find attending technology events a good way to learn more about the industry and stay up to date with it's ever changing landscape. It's also a great way to network, pick up new skills or even gain a different perspective on an area you're already familiar with.
One way I plug myself into the community is by looking up events local to me on meetup.com. As a DevOps engineer, I joined the devopsplayground group on the platform and have found their events interesting and educative. Recently, I attended one which was focused on Terraform. The venue was at GlobalLogic (a digital consulting services company in London) and this is how it went.
Arrival
In typical fashion, I arrived on time so I could get a good feel for the room and most importantly, figure out the directions to the bathroom.
Pardon the tired look. This was an after work meetup
The organisers did a great job of making the registration process seamless and in no time I was seated and ready to go. By the way, the GlobalLogic office is really nice and located in a choice area. I had a good view of Tower Bridge and the River Thames from where I sat.
Presentations
The presentations kicked off with a brief introduction to Terraform.
Terraform is an open-source tool developed by HashiCorp that enables developers and operations teams manage infrastructure as code. This means defining and provisioning infrastructure resources using simple, declarative configuration files which allow for more efficient, repeatable, and scalable deployments.
So basically you write some lines of code and boom! You have your EC2 instances (or whichever resource you fancy) up and running.
It was then followed by an hour-long lab session where we used Terraform to build interesting objects in Minecraft. We were provided relevant access to development environments which allowed us focus on core Terraform workflows.
In the process, we got to see some of the benefits of using an IaC tool - such as the reduced deployment time and infrastructure reliability. We also got tips on how to overcome common challenges, debug common errors, set log paths etc. We got to touch base on best practices as well e.g using version control for the configuration files, reusing configurations with modules, using a remote backend to store the terraform.tfstate file etc.
This is one of the things I built during the session
Don't you dare judge me...haha
You can watch the full presentation or go through the READMEs used for the labs.
We concluded with a Q&A session, where attendees got the chance to ask questions and share their own interesting experiences using Terraform.
Networking
Afterwards, I did some more mingling where I was able to share my thoughts on the presentations with others over pizza and drinks. I sadly couldn't steal a picture here but trust me when I say there was a great variety of food on display.
It was good to hear from other DevOps enthusiasts in the room, ask questions and lean in on their experiences.
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