Cloud-Terraform-OReilly

Welcome to the Terraform Self-Learning Repository! This repository is designed to accompany your journey through the book "Terraform: Up & Running" and will serve as a hands-on workspace for practicing and mastering Terraform. As you progress chapter by chapter, you'll find structured exercises, code snippets, and challenges that align with the book's content, ensuring a practical understanding of the concepts.

Why Infrastructure as Code (IaC)?

In today's rapidly evolving tech landscape, managing and provisioning infrastructure manually or through one-off scripts is neither scalable nor maintainable. Here's where Infrastructure as Code (IaC) comes into play:

1. Consistency & Reproducibility: With IaC, you can consistently reproduce your infrastructure across different stages (development, staging, production) without discrepancies.
2. Version Control: Just like software code, infrastructure code can be versioned, allowing teams to track changes, revert to previous states, and ensure everyone is aligned with a common infrastructure blueprint.
3. Scalability & Speed: IaC tools like Terraform allow for rapid provisioning and scaling of infrastructure, be it setting up a single server or deploying a global multi-region application.
4. Reduced Human Errors: By defining infrastructure as code, the room for manual error is significantly reduced. Infrastructure changes become reviewable, collaborative, and can be tested and validated.

Infrastructure as Code vs. Server Templating

While server templating tools like Packer or golden images provide pre-configured server images, they don't capture the full infrastructure picture. Templates might get outdated, and maintaining them can become a challenge. IaC, on the other hand:

Defines the entire infrastructure holistically, from networks to databases. Ensures idempotency, where re-applying configurations won't cause unintended side-effects. Offers a more granular control and a clearer "infrastructure history" through version control.

Other Forms of IaC

There are several IaC tools out there, each with its strengths. Tools like Ansible, Chef, or Puppet focus more on configuration management, ensuring servers are in a desired state. Cloud-specific tools like AWS CloudFormation or Azure Resource Manager templates are tightly integrated with their respective clouds but might lack flexibility or portability. Terraform stands out by offering a cloud-agnostic approach, allowing for multi-cloud strategies and ensuring you're not locked into a specific provider.

Setup

The main setup is through:

• LocalStack
• Use the Terraform Infrastructure as Code framework with LocalStack

Please ensure to have the necessary libraries and packages installed.

Docker

Following Install Docker Engine on Ubuntu to install Docker Engine.

Please ensure to enable Non-Root User Access for Docker - How to Fix Docker Permission Denied?:

sudo groupadd -f docker
sudo usermod -aG docker $USER
newgrp docker

Terraform

Please ensure to have Terraform installed - Install Terraform:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y gnupg software-properties-common
wget -O- https://apt.releases.hashicorp.com/gpg | \
gpg --dearmor | \
sudo tee /usr/share/keyrings/hashicorp-archive-keyring.gpg
gpg --no-default-keyring \
--keyring /usr/share/keyrings/hashicorp-archive-keyring.gpg \
--fingerprint
echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/hashicorp-archive-keyring.gpg] \
https://apt.releases.hashicorp.com $(lsb_release -cs) main" | \
sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hashicorp.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt-get install terraform

Conda Environment

Create a virutal python environment and install requirements.txt

conda env create -f environment.yml

To save a conda environment:

conda env export | grep -v "^prefix: " > environment.yml

Python Environment

If you are installing through pip

pip install -r requirements.txt

To save a python environment:

pip freeze > requirements.txt

Initialization & Verification

To verify tflocal is installed:

tflocal init
tflocal -version

Output the folowing:

Terraform v1.6.2
on linux_amd64
+ provider registry.terraform.io/hashicorp/aws v5.23.1

To verify localstack is installed:

localstack start -d
localstack status services

Output the folowing:

┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━┓
┃ Service                  ┃ Status      ┃
┡━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━┩
│ acm                      │ ✔ available │
│ apigateway               │ ✔ available │
│ cloudformation           │ ✔ available │
│ cloudwatch               │ ✔ available │
│ config                   │ ✔ available │
│ dynamodb                 │ ✔ available │
│ dynamodbstreams          │ ✔ available │
│ ec2                      │ ✔ available │
│ es                       │ ✔ available │
│ events                   │ ✔ available │
│ firehose                 │ ✔ available │
│ iam                      │ ✔ available │
│ kinesis                  │ ✔ available │
│ kms                      │ ✔ available │
│ lambda                   │ ✔ available │
│ logs                     │ ✔ available │
│ opensearch               │ ✔ available │
│ ram                      │ ✔ available │
│ redshift                 │ ✔ available │
│ resource-groups          │ ✔ available │
│ resourcegroupstaggingapi │ ✔ available │
│ route53                  │ ✔ available │
│ route53resolver          │ ✔ available │
│ s3                       │ ✔ available │
│ s3control                │ ✔ available │
│ scheduler                │ ✔ available │
│ secretsmanager           │ ✔ available │
│ ses                      │ ✔ available │
│ sns                      │ ✔ available │
│ sqs                      │ ✔ available │
│ ssm                      │ ✔ available │
│ stepfunctions            │ ✔ available │
│ sts                      │ ✔ available │
│ support                  │ ✔ available │
│ swf                      │ ✔ available │
│ transcribe               │ ✔ available │
└──────────────────────────┴─────────────┘

How to Use This Repository:

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