this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2025
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Programming
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I felt completely lost. What is Terraform?
Not exactly sure what that means, but that may help someone!
Terraform is part of a movement called "Infrastructure as Code" (IaC) which allows engineers to define their cloud infrastructure using code.
This is extremely useful as it allows you to:
version infrastructure changes
automate resource and configuration creation and management
have reproducible environments (think production and staging envs, or deploying a new production env to another datacenter)
Terraform (and OpenTofu) is different to most IaC project as it is agnostic of cloud providers: you can use it to deploy infrastructure to multiple providers, where their competitors are limited to their own platform (I think of AWS's Cloud Development Kit)
Nicely put. I frequently see the first part of this sentence and not the second. (Maybe I only pay attention to the first part and then disappoint myself...)
Terraform/Tofu allow me to use the same basic syntax and to have one project that controls AWS/GCP/K8s/my home servers, but I cannot use it to describe "a running server process" and just deploy that on any of those places. Instead I'd need to have like
aws_beanstalk_service { ... }andgcp_application { ... }andkubernetes_manifest { ... }andsystemd_service { ... }and the contents of those blocks would be totally different (and I'd need a bunch of different ancillary blocks for each of those).