As I’m going to be interviewing for a job that works on this platform, I’ve decided to read up on what Terraform is (as well as Nomad, but that’s for another post). This is actually something I’ve wanted to explore for awhile now, but haven’t had a good reason to get into it yet.
Terraform is very similar to AWS’s CloudFormation, which is basically Infrastructure as Code. However, the main advantage is that Terraform is platform agnostic, which means that I am able to use the same tool to deploy on multiple, different cloud providers. The catch however, is that the code is obviously different because services are different on different providers. Terraform basically just provides the platform/tool to manage it all in one place, but it’s way more powerful than that.
After watching a few talks and going through some documentation, the concept makes a lot of sense, and it might actually be pretty easy for me to deploy my own projects through this. Even though it would be a little pointless to use such a tool to deploy a single instance, hah.
I’ve watched two talks about Terraform so far.
- Going Multi-Cloud with Terraform and Nomad
- How to Build Reusable, Composable, Battle tested Terraform Modules
I gotta say, my mind is a little overloaded right now. But I am very impressed with how he managed to bring up an entire infrastructure across different platforms and region in <10mins. It’s also amazing that by SSH-ing into the bastion host, he was able to have access to all nodes across different regions, and schedule services to launch on them without switching regions. (thanks to the VPN)
I am excited to see what type of projects I could test deploy with this new tool.