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Introduction to Terraform

What does Terraform do?

Terraform is a powerful orchestration tool for creating, updating, deleting, and otherwise managing infrastructure in an easy-to-understand, declarative manner. Terraform's documentation is very good, but at a glance:

Be Declarative - Specify desired infrastructure results in Terraform (*.tf) files, and let Terraform do the heavy work of figuring out how to make that specification a reality.

Scry the Future - Use terraform plan to see a list of everything that Terraform would do without actually making those changes.

Version Infrastructure - Check Terraform files into a VCS to track changes to and manage versions of your infrastructure.

Why Terraform?

Why did we latch onto Terraform instead of something like CloudFormation?

Cloud-Agnostic - Unlike CloudFormation, Terraform is able to incorporate different resource providers to manage infrastructure across multiple cloud services (not just AWS).

Custom Providers - Terraform can be extended to manage tools that don't come natively through use of custom providers. We wrote a Layer0 provider so that Terraform can manage Layer0 resources in addition to tools and resources and infrastructure beyond Layer0's scope.

Terraform has some things to say on the matter as well.

Advantages Versus Layer0 CLI?

Why should you move from using (or scripting) the Layer0 CLI directly?

Reduce Fat-Fingering Mistakes - Creating Terraform files (and using terraform plan) allows you to review your deployment and catch errors. Executing Layer0 CLI commands one-by-one is tiresome, non-transportable, and a process ripe for typos.

Go Beyond Layer0 - Retain the benefits of leveraging Layer0's concepts and resources using our provider, but also gain the ability to orchestrate resources and tools beyond the CLI's scope.

How do I get Terraform?

Check out Terraform's documentation on the subject.