Building Cloud Infrastructure with Terraform

In this lecture we start taking an in-depth look at Terraform and will cover the following topics:

• Terminology and concepts

• How Terraform works

• Terraform workflows

In this lecture we take our first look at HCL, the programming language used with Terraform to create infrastructure.

We take a deeper look at syntax for the following Terraform building blocks:

• Terraform providers such as AWS

• Terraform resources for modeling compute resources

  
  

In Lab 1.1 we create a Amazon Web Services account and also create a dedicated user for terraform.

In this lab we download Terraform and set up our development environment.

In this lab we configure the AWS Terraform Provider using our AWS credentials.

In this lab we code and create our first compute resources in AWS using Terraform.

In this lab we make a change to our compute resource and observe how Terraform handles changes.

In this lab we learn how to destroy the resources we create using Terraform.

In this lecture you will learn about the different types of Terraform variables including:

• Input variables

• Output variables

• Data types - strings, booleans, maps, and lists

In this lecture you will learn how to declare variables and assign values to them using a variety of methods.

In this lab you will replace your hard-coded AWS access and secret key values with a Terraform variable.

In this lab we create another AWS EC2 instance using Terraform using hard-coded values for certain resource attributes.

In this lab you will learn how to use a Terraform map as a lookup table to replace the hard-coded region-specific AMI value.

In this lab you will learn how to set variable values on the command line when running terraform.

In this lab you will learn how to use an output variable to display values for a computed resource attribute.

In this lecture you will learn how to use interpolations in Terraform to substitute real values for variables when configuring a resource. The following interpolations will be covered:

• Conditionals

• Built-in functions

• Templates

• Managing multiple instances of a resource using count.index

• Basic math functions

In this lab you will learn how to add conditional logic statements to your Terraform code. Conditionals are typically used to enable or disable a resource attribute or to set the quantity of a particular resource.

In this lab you will learn how to manage multiple instances of a resource using the special variable count.index.

In this lab you will learn how to create and render templates within Terraform. Templates are particularly use when you need to specify environment specific values in configuration files.

In this lab you will learn how to perform basic math functions in Terraform using the terraform console.

In this lecture you will learn how Terraform handles dependencies between resources automatically using implicit references and explicit references.

In this lab you will create both an implicit and explicit resource dependency between two or more resources and observe how Terraform goes about creating those resources.

In this lecture you will learn how provisioners are used to bootstrap compute resources during the resource creation process. I will cover:

• File provisioner

• Local-exec provisioner

• Remote-exec provisioner

• Configuring remote connections

In the first Provisioner lab we will create an SSH key pair that will be used to log into our compute resource.

In this lab you will create a network rule in Terraform to allow SSH traffic to a compute resource.

In this lab you will verify that you can log in to a compute resource using the SSH key pair created earlier.

In this lab you will install Apache on a compute resource using an inline provisioner created in Terraform.

In this lab you will configure a file provisioner to copy files to a compute resource during the bootstrap process.

In this lab you will replace the inline provisioner with a shell script that gets uploaded to a compute resource and executed.

In this lecture I discuss Terraform data sources and how they are used to fetch information about pre-existing resources or information from a cloud provider.

In this lecture you will learn about how Terraform modules can be used to organize configurations into re-usable and shareable packages. We will also touch on different sources for modules including the public Terraform Registry.

In this lab you will use the public AWS VPC module to create a complete 3-tier virtual private cloud complete with public and private subnets.

In this lab you will learn how to create your own basic terraform module.

In this lecture I cover how Terraform keeps track of resources, dependencies and attributes in the Terraform state file. I will also cover both local state files and remote state files using a storage backend.

In this lab you will learn how to import resources into your Terraform state file so that they can be managed by Terraform.

In this lab you will configure Terraform to store state remotely in an S3 storage bucket.

In this video I demonstrate how to store your AWS access and secret key in a credentials file rather than in environment variables.