TERRAFORM: THE LAST TREND IN INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGEMENT
What is Terraform and what are its basic features?
Today we will talk about Terraform, an innovative tool to build and manage infrastructures in a simply and efficient manner.
In the IT scenario, requirements and workloads change constantly and there’s an ongoing demand for deployment of applications and infrastructures. IT managers used to install servers and resources needed manually, as well as they handled any change in the infrastructure, but now the things are slowly changing towards the use of tools which replace the human intervention in the management of IT architectures.
But what is taking the place of the manual process? In this case, we are talking about Infrastructure as code. Just using a piece of code you can control anything in your infrastructure including IT resources, storage, databases, networks, DNS, scaling: in a few words you are able to manage everything.
Indeed, in recent years cloud technology use is steadily growing, and with it the need of an integrated IT solution capable to interact with different vendors. Cloud environments dependent on a single provider are vulnerable and easily subjects to failures. So the need of something that allows IT administrators to build a less risky environment and to deploy workloads across different vendors and the cloud become real and significant.
Just in this landscape came Terraform: a single tool that enables to manage multiple IT environments directly by the end user. With Terraform you can build, change and update your infrastructure in a extremely easy and efficient way. Besides, this tool is very easy to install and to use, and is compatible with almost all the platforms available on the market. Indeed, it works either with popular providers services and personalized solutions, including Openstack, one of the most innovative technology of these days.
As it is now, Terraform makes you able to manage different types of infrastructures and applications, in particular it works with the following vendors:
- Atlas (Hashicorp workflow engine)
- AWS, GCE, Azure, OpenStack, DigitalOcean, Docker, CloudStack, Heroku, vSphere, vCloud (Cloud Infrastructure)
- Chef, Rundeck (Configuration Management)
- CloudFlare, DNSMadeEasy, Dyn, DNSimple (DNS provider)
- Mailgun (Email)
- Consul, PowerDNS (DNS and service registry)
- MySQL, PostgreSQL (Database)
- StatusCake (Monitoring)
- TLS (Certificates)
Talking about Openstack, Terraform enables you to manage several modules of Openstack Infrastructure, but not all of them. In details, it supports the following components:
- Block Storage
- Compute
- Networking
- Load Balancer
- Firewall
- Object Storage
Terraform does not support “Heat”, the orchestration engine, because of their same nature: both are orchestration tools, so a replication wouldn’t be useful.
In conclusion, we can say that Terraform is a very innovative solution, capable to simplify deployment processes and to resolve issues about multiple vendors. With a single tool you can manage efficiently your infrastructure, and you can do it rapidly and easily.
Next time we will look into this topic and we will see Terraform features in details.
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