Devops Columbia October 2020 - Gabriel Alix: A Discussion on Terraform
- 1. Terraform: Why? Devops Columbia October 22nd , 2020 Gabriel Alix VP, Intel galix@applied-insight.com
- 2. 2 Gabe is a Cloud Technologist and accomplished Cyber practitioner who has led & built complex workloads across the IC for 20+ years. He's a native New Yorker from Washington Heights, with a boisterous laugh and calm demeanor. Gabe has built a strong career starting in Federal service and has evolved into CTO and now VP of Intel for Applied Insight. In addition to his technical accolades, he's a social leader that believes in building and growing strong teams @gabrielalix Gabriel Alix
- 3. At Applied Insight, we deliver pragmatic solutions for federal missions that cannot wait. We work closely with agencies and industry to overcome technical and cultural hurdles to innovation, empowering them with the latest cloud, data and cyber capabilities. Our solutions help people work better, faster and more securely – no matter where they are. To learn more about us, visit applied-insight.com. Applied Insight 3
- 4. Agenda • Intro/Purpose • Takeaways • What is Terraform • Why should you care? • Time to feature release • Lots of neat built-in functions • Organization/Modules • Variables and State 4 • Data and Resources • Circle of Life – Init/Plan/Apply/Destroy • Module Registry • HashiCorp Ecosystem • 0.12 - 0.13 – 0.14 • Other Resources
- 5. Intro 5 WHAT IS ALL THE HUBBUB WITH TERRAFORM?! I’M GOOD WITH CLOUDFORMATION, SHOULD I EVEN PAY ATTENTION TO THIS?
- 6. Takeaways 6 TERRAFORM IS A VERSATILE CLOUD ORCHESTRATER REALLY EASY TO PICK UP AND START WORKING WITH NOT WITHOUT ITS ISSUES (COUNT FUNCTION NOT WORKING IN MODULES, WEIRD IF/THEN/ELSE CONDITIONS, ADVANCED HCL GETS COMPLICATED) PRE – 0.12 AWS CFN IS FIGHTING BACK
- 7. What is Terraform? 7 Terraform is a popular Cloud Orchestration tool. It has become popular due to its ease of use, some missteps by AWS, and how well organized complex projects can be, and at the time, some missing quality of life features in CFN. Terraform also promises one language to connect to any cloud provider – think of a multi- cloud-scenario <Insert snarky Lord of Rings One Ring Reference ;)>
- 8. Why Should You Even Care? 8 Is common tech used by both Commercial and Government Customers Can be used within your DevOps process Provides features currently missing from air-gapped region’s version of CFN Can you be used to prove the state of infrastructure for Security reviews
- 9. Feature Parity and Intrinsic functions • Took 36 days for Aurora Serverless to receive CFN support • There is the perception that CFN is not a Tier 1 services within AWS • Reddit Rage • Limited Intrinsic functions (no looping, counting, random generation, etc..) 9
- 10. Installing Terraform Terraform is a single binary written in Go wget https://releases.hashicorp.com/terraform/0.13.4/terraform_0.13.4_linux_amd64.zip sudo unzip terraform_0.13.4_linux_amd64.zip -d /usr/local/bin 10
- 11. File Structure 11 Root folder contains main files and subfolder (modules) Every folder contains the following: • main.tf • outputs.tf • variables.tf #Create directory structure mkdir -p terraform-aws/{networking,compute,storage} cd terraform-aws #Create root files touch {main.tf,variables.tf,outputs.tf,terraform.tfvars} #Create Sub-folder files touch {networking,compute,storage}/{main.tf,variables.tf,outputs.tf}
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- 14. CloudFormation is Not Slacking = CDK CloudFormation Macros introduced Count (seem familiar? ;) ) 14
- 16. Stateful 16
- 18. Data and Resource Objects • Providers (e.g. AWS, Azure, …) • Each has their own collection of Data and Resource Objects • Data objects – lookup information for use within Terraform • Resource Objects – create actual items within a given Provider 18
- 19. Terraform Workspaces 19 Creates multiple environments to allow you to deploy various copies of your Terraform configurations
- 20. Circle of Life – Init/Plan/Apply/Destroy • Init – will initialize a given Terraform project. Need to rerun when adding a new provider or module • Plan – will show you what changes will be made • Apply – takes the plan and executes it • Destroy – self-explanatory 20
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- 25. What about the Competition? AKA if CDK + Terraform had a baby 25
- 26. Other Resources 26 Terraform Best Practices HashiConf 2020 Terraform Module Registry
- 28. Thank you Devops Columbia October 22nd , 2020 Gabriel Alix VP, IC Vertical galix@applied-insight.com