In this post, I\u2019ll cover some of the main questions our clients have about Terraform<\/a> and how it can work with DevOps<\/a> to simplify cloud migration automation and cloud infrastructure management. Together, they provide a solution that works without one-off scripts or manual configuration changes in any cloud environment, from Azure<\/a> to Amazon Web Services<\/a> (AWS) and beyond.<\/p>\n Organizations are beginning to use Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) to deploy infrastructure resources because of its vast customization capabilities. Using IaC as the primary deployment method allows you to configure, provision, and manage operational environments like any other application or code release. When paired with DevOps, IaC creates consistent environments for supporting your cloud infrastructure resources.<\/strong><\/p>\n Once you have consistent environments, you can place automation at every corner of your infrastructure lifecycle. Version control, continuous integration, monitoring, testing and more become possible when you successfully integrate IaC and DevOps. Critical infrastructure that supports production applications and systems become source controlled, and you can test and validate changes to infrastructure within lower environments first. Gone are the old management ways of one-off resource changes and inconsistent infrastructure configurations across environments.<\/p>\n However, you need a strong DevOps culture within your organization for IaC to succeed because it puts the common policies and procedures in place that allow IaC to work.<\/strong> Before going further, let\u2019s take a closer look at what DevOps is and how it ensures consistency.<\/p>\n If you are confused about what DevOps is, you are not alone. Googling the definition of DevOps will retrieve various answers, all of which will be at least partly accurate, depending on your needs at the time. So rather than giving a blanket definition of DevOps, I will instead illustrate what DevOps looks like in practice.<\/p>\n Imagine your organization has a development team dedicated to pushing code changes to a critical application. Their whole responsibility is ensuring your team creates and manages the code and that it\u2019s efficient and operational. Once the team creates a new feature or patch, they need to test the change to see if it will run smoothly in production.<\/p>\n To do this, they package up their work and notify a separate operations team to implement the change and test it in a lower environment.<\/strong> If the changes and testing work, great! Your two teams have successfully validated a new feature or patch.<\/p>\n However, what if the changes and testing don\u2019t work? Because the teams are separate, a wall exists between them, and trust, code management and deployment can fall through the cracks. The two teams will blame each other, which results in little resolution.<\/p>\n DevOps is the solution to this separation of teams, processes and ownership. It combines the development team and the operations team. The DevOps team works together, and all team members are part of the different processes. This integration provides many benefits, such as innovation acceleration, greater collaboration, enhanced security, and improved reliability, which can lead to drastically increased speed of development and deployment of products.<\/strong><\/p>\n Managing cloud infrastructure resources using IaC paired with DevOps begins with deciding which IaC toolset to use. Each has its pros and cons, but Terraform is a great middle-ground resource for organizations that want or need a consistent configuration method for managing multiple providers (Azure, AWS, Google, and so on). Terraform is a user-friendly, readable tool that enforces consistency across providers without users having to learn the specific templated languages and nuances of different cloud providers.<\/strong><\/p>\n Below are a few additional examples of the benefits Terraform can provide benefits to your organization:<\/p>\n Of course, like any tech solution, Terraform requires some setup. You must compile the files you need for infrastructure management and enter them into the system. Most of these will be tfstate files (see below). Importing your existing resources for management within Terraform can also be time-consuming.<\/strong><\/p>\n However, the time invested will likely be worthwhile. Terraform\u2019s syntax and structure are consistent regardless of your provider, and the libraries associated with the various providers are extensive and user-friendly. This syntax structure allows you to integrate IaC for all your infrastructure environments seamlessly, and it can help you span multiple cloud providers with a limited learning curve.<\/p>\nWhat Is IaC, and Why Does It Matter?<\/h2>\n
What Is DevOps?<\/h2>\n
Why Should I Use Terraform IaC?<\/h2>\n
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