Summary of What We Learned

Summary

In this course, we explored the importance of Terraform as an IaC tool for simplifying the management and provisioning of our cloud resources. Terraform, a tool developed by HashiCorp, allows us to efficiently define, deploy, and maintain infrastructure resources using declarative lines of code.

Terraform maintains a state file that helps track and manage our infrastructure’s current state. The state file in Terraform is a critical component: It’s the single source of truth for our infrastructure setup. Terraform allows us the flexibility of remotely managing states collaboratively.

Terraform is a superb infrastructure automation tool and it’s used mainly for infrastructure orchestration.

In this course, we reviewed the rudiments of IaC and how Terraform compares with other automation tools. We also established the basic flow of provisioning infrastructure using Terraform. We went further to look at the basics of Terraform as well as the HashiCorp Configuration Language.

We learned about major concepts like:

• Terraform provisioners: These are used to execute scripts or commands on local or remote resources as we create them.
• Terraform workspaces: These allow us to separate concerns and have different configuration files for different environments.
• Terraform modules: These allow us to make our Terraform configuration files reusable.
• Terraform backends: These help us to define where and how our state files are stored.
• Terraform Cloud: This is a software as a service (SaaS) offered by HashiCorp that provides embedded functionalities for managing our Terraform projects.

This course is designed to include a hands-on project that encourages learners to embark on their infrastructure projects using Terraform. Learners are encouraged to take this further and build real-world infrastructure specific to their needs on their preferred cloud platform.