Speaker: Scott McAllister @stmcallister

For more, see the table of contents

Notes

• Problem: onboarding same thing dozens of time
• Infrastructure as code – fast to configure/scale, consistent, reduce errors, self documenting
• AWS CloudFormation, Azure ARM, Terraform and Pulumi in this space. (Pulumi has been rising and is 2)
• Terraform is declarative, Pulumi is imperative; use existing programming language

Terraform

• Declarative
• Open source – most people use this oer enterprise
• HCL – Hashicorp configuraton language
• Manage infrastructure – build, change, version, single source of truth
• No longer use UI; Terraform will overwrite changes
• Hashicorp maintains Terraform engine

Providers

• Hashicorp maintains a few large providers (ex: AWS)
• Everything else run by community or other companies
• Doc example https://registry.terraform.io/providers/PagerDuty/pagerduty/latest/docs

Flow

• Practitioner writes infrastructure as code
• init – takes definitions in directory, downloads providers
• plan – want to do this so not billed before confirm
• apply – changes pushed to environments. Runs plan first. Type ”yes” to confirm or use auto approve flag
• destroy – wipe out everything have
• Terraform state has data about config – ex; generated id. In JSON format

Good practices

• Name service what is providing. Ex: ”Checkout API”
• Version control system
• Code review
• Automated testing
• Put tokens in environment variable rather than hard coding in script

HCL blocks

• resource – you are going to manage it, create if not present, etc. Convention: providerName_endpoint. Then unique id – like a variable name within terraform. Ex: resource ”pagerduty_user” ”lisa”, Reference as pageruty_user.lisa.id
• data – like a query. Get data about something that already exists in system. Reference as data.provider_user.id
• required_providers – downloads binaries when run tf init. Recommend locking into a version or at least a major version

Data types

• strings
• numbers
• [list, of, data]
• { a: b, c:d } (complex object)

Can play for free: https://github.com/PagerDuty-Samples/pd-populate-dev-account

Q&A

• Can find syntax and logic errors in plan. Depends on provider
• Libraries to convert to HCL. Ex: LDAP to HCL

My take

This served as both a good overview and a good review of the basics. I like that it had a lot of code in it. I’m taking the Terraform cert this month so nice timing for me to attend this talk. I really appreciate the link/API to play for free. Testing on AWS is scary :).