From the course: Developing Infrastructure as Code with Terraform

Discover if Terraform is multicloud - Terraform Tutorial

From the course: Developing Infrastructure as Code with Terraform

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

Discover if Terraform is multicloud

“

- Let's talk a little bit more about the multi-cloud aspects of Terraform. And I highlight this because there's a lot of misconceptions about what it means to be multi-cloud in Terraform. We already talked about it a little bit. So yes, Terraform is multi-cloud. It works equally well on AWS, Azure, GCP, VMware, many other clouds. But the providers are cloud-specific. Similar resources are very different from one cloud to another. And we're going to go over sort of the syntax of defining some of those, and I'll show you how different they are. And the configurations are not portable between clouds, right? So there is, we're going to be developing specific solutions per cloud. So if you're in an environment where you're running resources in AWS and GCP or you're doing a cloud migration, Terraform can definitely help, but it may not help in the way that you're expecting it to. So I just want to highlight kind of the differences between these. So I'm just going to show the syntax of creating a simple virtual machine across some of the major cloud providers. And we haven't gone, we're going to go through the syntax of Terraform configure in the next lesson. But, just want to show, you know, what it looks like to create a, you know, this would be an EC2 instance in AWS. So you can see we're specifying an AMI, which is specific to AWS, instance type, subnet ID. These things are, these are all AWS specifics. And this is how we would do it in GCP. You can see that the attributes that it takes to do this are very, very different, right? We're doing the same thing, we're just creating a virtual machine. But the way that we define that is very different. And it's verbose across all of these. And then finally, we can do the same thing in Azure, right? So we're creating a virtual machine. It's a totally different configuration, right? The end result is essentially the same thing. We're just going to get a server running, but the way that we do it is very different. So I just want to drive that point home that these configurations are going to be specific per cloud and there's not really a mechanism in Terraform to abstract that.

Contents