What is Terraforma?

Your business depends on infrastructure, and the bigger your business grows, the more you need to scale infrastructure. The demands for growth increase to a point where the number of components that make it possible can become overwhelming. Couple that with the teams involved in making this growth happen and the complications continue to mount.

That's why you need to employ the right tools to make scaling not only possible, but seamless and (almost) effortless. This means you're looking at technologies like containers, clouds, network appliances, software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and Kubernetes. And managing external resources with multiple providers can add yet another layer of complexity to the mix.

A tool to help your business grow to meet demand

Hashicorp's Terraform is a declarative coding tool that enables developers to use a high-level configuration language called HCL (HashCorp Configuration Language) to describe an end state to be achieved by their cloud or on-premises infrastructure for an application whether successfully executed.

This infrastructure as code (IaC) allows your developers to code the infrastructure and automate provisioning. By doing so, you can experience faster, more reliable, and more repeatable growth (avoiding configuration drift).

Not only that, but by employing IaC, your developers can perform more experimentation, testing, and optimization for your company's applications and clouds.

So what makes Terraform the right choice for this task? Considering you have other options like Puppet, Chef, SaltStack, and Ansible, let's look at why your company should consider this particular tool.

• Create promotions
• Manage an entire product catalog
• Optimize your online store for search engines (SEO)
• Make it easy for customers to browse and search your products with ease
• Use easy one-page checkouts and shopping carts
• Save user credit card information
• Manage orders
• Offer customer account dashboards
• Offer many customer service options
• Supports mobile HTML5
• Mobile app support for Android and iOS
• Integrate a wide range of checkout features

Magento also includes:

• Targeted promotions
• Rule-based dynamic product relationships
• Persistent purchases
• Automated email marketing reminders
• Private sales
• Gift registries
• Gift options
• Reward Points
• Store credits
• Multiple wish lists
• Add to cart via SKU
• Return Management Authorization (RMA)

For any business concerned about scaling, Magento has you covered. Magento 2.0 can:

• Process a large number of orders per hour
• Handle near-instant server response times for catalog browsing
• Significantly reduce cart and checkout page response times
• Handle order volume spikes, even with very large product catalogs and customer lists
• Have concurrent administrators on the backend

If you're looking for one of the most powerful eCommerce platforms available, Magento is what you need.

Provisioning over configuration management

Tools like Puppet and Chef are known as configuration management tools. This means you can configure all of your data center (or cloud-based) servers and then deploy those configurations to target servers from a single source. These types of tools are an awesome addition for any business that utilizes multiple servers and prefers to manage their configurations from a single controller.

Terraform, on the other hand, is a provisioning tool, meaning it is designed to provision servers. This raises the question: what is provisioning?

Provisioning is the process of deploying IT infrastructure. In other words, you prepare a server for use by installing the operating system and any software needed to serve your business. Manually provisioning servers can be time-consuming. And when you're tasked with provisioning a large number of servers, doing so manually can lead to a lot of errors.

By provisioning a tool like Terraform, you automate the process and achieve a level of scale and speed that you couldn't achieve by doing the task manually. With Terraform, you can provision servers, load balancers, databases, and network devices. You can then use tools like Ansible and SaltStack to automate the configuration of these servers and services.

Therefore, it is not a question of one or the other, as they perform different functions. For example, you could provision a cluster of servers with Terraform, configure them with SaltStack, and then orchestrate container deployment with Kubernetes.

But at the base of this deployment chain is a tool like Terraform.

What is the Terraform process?

Terraform has a very specific workflow to take into consideration. IaC delivery looks like this:

Use declarative configuration files to build your infrastructure as code, making sure to use concise descriptions of all resources, such as:

 resource “aws_instance” “example” {
  ami = “ami-408c7f28”
  instance_type = “t1.micro”
  monitoring = true
  vpc_security_group_ids = (
      “sg-1436abcf”,
  )
  tags = {
    Name = “Application Server”
    Environment = “production”
  }
   root_block_device {
    delete_on_termination = false
  }
 }

You can also define providers, such as:

 provider “aws” {
 region = “eu-west-1”
 version = “~> 1.19”
 access_key = “${ var.aws _access_key}”
 secret_key = “${ var.aws _secret_key}”
 }

After you finish writing the HCL file, you must verify that the configuration execution plan matches what is expected for provisioning. The plan command is run in the directory containing the HCL file, like this:

 terraform plans

If everything is ok, you apply the HCL with the command:

 terraform apply

HCL enforcement will then apply the changes to all of your resources so that they reach the desired state.

And because Terraform is open source and widely used, there are a large number of supported providers, such as:

• AWS
• Blue
• Google Cloud Platform
• Kubernetes
• Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
• Alibaba Cloud
• Active Directory
• File
• Limit
• CISCO WING
• Rudder
• VMware vSphere

After applying your states, you can also use Terraform Change Automation. With this feature, you can create very complex change sets that can be applied to your provisioned servers, with very little human interaction.

Terraform use cases

Let's take a look at some popular Terraform use cases.

• Register external services – Terraform can register external services using the Consul provider.
• Code Vault Management – ​​Vault is a service that stores and controls access to code secrets such as tokens, passwords, and certificates. With Terraform you can automate the use of Vault to reduce human errors.
• Manage Kubernetes resources – Terraform allows you to schedule Pod instances and expose them to network resources using the Terraform Kubernetes Provider.
• Multi-Tier Applications – Terraform is an excellent tool for building and managing N-tier architecture, with each layer described as a collection of resources.
• Self-service infrastructure – Terraform enables easy provisioning for teams in a “self-service” manner, so each team can manage its own infrastructure with the tools provided by the provider.
• Disposable Environments – With Terraform you can write HCL files for temporary environments that can be used briefly and then discarded. These environments can be used for testing or Q&A purposes.

Conclusion

Terraform is a remarkable platform that can help your infrastructure provisioning be more reliable, faster, and repeatable. While there is a considerable learning curve with this tool, once you have developers who know how to employ it, your business will grow faster and further than you thought possible.