How to Automate Your AWS Cloud Infrastructure with Terraform?

The process of developing an application does not begin with the writing of code. To be useful, it must be deployed in a scalable environment, run with high availability, provide backups, and so on. It’s difficult to build and maintain infrastructure in today’s world when technology advances at a breakneck pace. Terraform is without a doubt one of the most efficient ways to quickly build, version, and change current or new infrastructure. It can manage both new and existing cloud service providers, as well as automated solutions.

However, if you want to learn about this solution to infrastructure management, now is your chance! This article today will help you use Terraform to manage and automate certain aspects of cloud computing.

Why Cloud Automation?

Cloud automation refers to the use of software tools and processes to automate the provisioning, management, and monitoring of cloud resources and services. Cloud automation is important for several reasons:

• Efficiency: Cloud automation can streamline repetitive and time-consuming tasks, reducing the need for manual intervention and enabling more efficient resource allocation.
• Consistency: Cloud automation can ensure that resources are provisioned and managed consistently across environments, reducing the risk of human error and enabling more predictable outcomes.
• Scalability: Cloud automation can help organizations to rapidly scale resources up or down in response to changing demand, improving agility and reducing costs.
• Cost Optimization: Cloud automation can help organizations optimize cloud resource usage and reduce costs, by identifying unused or underutilized resources, rightsizing instances, and automating cost management.
• Security: Cloud automation can help organizations to enforce security policies and best practices, reducing the risk of security breaches and improving compliance.
• DevOps: Cloud automation is a key enabler of DevOps practices, enabling more frequent and reliable software releases, improved collaboration between development and operations teams, and faster time-to-market.

What is Terraform?

Terraform is an open-source infrastructure as code (IAC) tool that allows you to define and provision infrastructure using a high-level configuration language. It was developed by HashiCorp and supports a wide range of cloud platforms and services, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and more.

With Terraform, you can write declarative configuration files that define your desired infrastructure state. These files are then used to create, modify, and delete infrastructure resources in a consistent and reproducible manner. Terraform also provides a way to manage dependencies between resources, handle state changes, and track changes over time.

Terraform works with a variety of public and private cloud providers. AWS, IBM Cloud (previously Bluemix), Alibaba Cloud, Google Cloud Platform, DigitalOcean, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure are among them.

Why use Terraform as Infrastructure as Code?

Infrastructure deployment and management are not simple tasks. On top of a lot of ever-changing topic expertise, you’ll need to grasp new tools or a new methodology. There are several phases to setting up an infrastructure for a cloud-based app. You’ll make mistakes unless you write them all down as detailed checklists and follow them diligently. Infrastructure as code is required to do this.

If you’re not familiar with the term “infrastructure as code,” it refers to the practice of controlling infrastructure in a file or files rather than manually setting resources through a user interface. In this context, a resource refers to any piece of infrastructure in a specific environment, such as a virtual machine, security group, network interface, and so on. One of the most powerful tools available in Terraform. Platform agnostic, state management, and operator confidence are all advantages. Most significantly, supplying infrastructure as code eliminates human error and promotes automation. It writes, plans, and applies code to offer infrastructure as code.

Other reason includes:

• Multi-Cloud Support: Terraform supports multiple cloud platforms, making it easy to provision and manage infrastructure across different providers. This allows you to use a single tool to manage resources across AWS, Azure, GCP, and other cloud platforms.
• Declarative Configuration: Terraform uses a declarative configuration language to define infrastructure as code. This makes it easier to understand and manage infrastructure, as changes are made to the configuration file rather than through manual updates to resources.
• Reusable Code: Terraform code is modular and reusable, making it easier to share code across projects and teams. This also means that you can quickly spin up new environments or modify existing ones by reusing code that has already been written.
• Version Control: Terraform code can be version controlled, making it easier to track changes, revert to previous versions, and collaborate on infrastructure code with other team members.
• Plan and Preview: Terraform provides a preview feature that allows you to see the changes that will be made to infrastructure resources before they are applied. This can help you identify potential issues or conflicts before they occur, reducing the risk of downtime or errors.
• Automation: Terraform can be used to automate the provisioning and management of infrastructure, reducing the need for manual intervention and improving efficiency.

Key Features:

Terraform is a widely used tool because of its key features:

• Declarative Configuration: Terraform uses a declarative configuration language to define infrastructure as code. This means that you specify the desired end state of your infrastructure, and Terraform automatically works out the actions needed to get there.
• Multi-Cloud Support: Terraform supports multiple cloud platforms, including AWS, Azure, GCP, and more. This allows you to use a single tool to manage infrastructure across different providers.
• Resource Graph: Terraform builds a resource graph of all your infrastructure resources and their dependencies, allowing it to determine the order in which resources need to be provisioned or updated.
• Plan and Preview: Terraform provides a preview feature that allows you to see the changes that will be made to infrastructure resources before they are applied. This can help you identify potential issues or conflicts before they occur, reducing the risk of downtime or errors.
• State Management: Terraform tracks the state of your infrastructure resources, allowing it to determine what changes need to be made to bring your infrastructure up to the desired state.
• Modules: Terraform code can be modularized into reusable modules, making it easier to share code across projects and teams. This also means that you can quickly spin up new environments or modify existing ones by reusing code that has already been written.
• Automation: Terraform can be used to automate the provisioning and management of infrastructure, reducing the need for manual intervention and improving efficiency.

How Terraform works?

Write: Write infrastructure as code using declarative configuration files. HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) allows for concise descriptions of resources using blocks, arguments, and expressions.

Plan: Run terraform plan to check whether the execution plan for a configuration matches your expectations before provisioning or changing infrastructure.

Apply: Apply changes to hundreds of cloud providers with terraform apply to reach the desired state of the configuration.

Terraform with AWS

AWS and Terraform both offer services for coding and managing infrastructure tools. Most modern firms, on the other hand, have mastered Terraform and integrated it with AWS to manage all of their AWS products. Terraform may be used to manage and automate AWS tools with the correct programming style.

Terraform configuration files are organized by modules. Modules are designed to be shared and reused between projects, but they may also be used within a project to assist in structuring a complicated service with several infrastructural components. This only works with files that end in the suffix. Subdirectories are designated for modules in the current working folder.

Let’s move further to Build, change, and destroy AWS infrastructure using Terraform.

Workflow of Terraform with AWS

To begin with, you are required to sign in to your AWS Console to use AWS Services. So you must have an AWS account with you. Next, you should install Terraform by downloading a primary package or as a binary package.

Follow the steps by step commands to automate your AWS Infrastructure:

• Firstly, AWS CloudFormation begins by encoding infrastructure data into the appropriate configuration. Template in Service execution is the process of generating configuration file with proper coding of infrastructure.
• Secondly, Build Infrastructure: You must authenticate AWS to create an EC2 isntance. The set of files used to describe infrastructure is known as a Terraform configuration. You will write your first configuration to define a single AWS EC2 instance.
• Then, once you create a new configuration you need to initialize the directory with terraform init. Moreover, you should use  consistent formatting in all of your configuration files. The terraform fmt command automatically updates configurations in the current directory for readability and consistency.
• Next, Apply the configuration now with the terraform apply command. Executing the plan might take a few minutes as since Terraform waits for the EC2 instance to become available.
• Thus, you’ve now created infrastructure using Terraform now! Terraform files are stored in AWS S3 Bucket, once the solution enters the deployment phase,
• Now, you can launch your files and implement them for creation of automated AWS Services.

You’ve now developed a custom AWS Cloud resource for Terraform. You may also use it to effectively manage public and on-premise cloud services. In this way AWS Infrastructure gets automated with Terraform.

Terraform Destroy

Finally, enter the terraform destruct command to demolish all of the infrastructures you’ve developed. The command may be used to delete or terminate all resources, including EC2, ELB, and RDS. When you run the command, Terraform will ask for authentication to delete the whole infrastructure. If you select Yes, Terraform will demolish all of the infrastructure you’ve created in a matter of minutes.

Conclusion

To summarise, Terraform is a well-known open-source infrastructure-as-code software application for automating AWS infrastructure. It makes resource deployment easier and allows you to fully utilize the possibilities of this powerful architecture. This is being used by the majority of cloud-based organizations to carry out their implementations, resulting in increased efficiency and stability. As a result, this is incredibly sturdy and filled with features. It’s also a flexible orchestration tool that can quickly construct, alter, and destroy the complete infrastructure. To improve your expertise and further your career, you may take the HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate test.

Start Preparing for the HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate exam with Online Tutorials Now!