One of the things we’re most concerned with is reducing our dependence on other companies and individuals. We don’t want to hit any roadblocks in our growth, and would rather not give control over to someone else. This is especially true for your infrastructure. If you ever want to deploy into a remote datacenter, you’ll want to first know the advantages of terraform before deploying your stack with this tool.
Terraform can deploy your infrastructure in a fast, scalable, and repeatable way. The main benefits of terraform are:
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- Infrastructure As Code
- Infrastructure as Code: One of the biggest benefits of IAC is that it allows developers to define their infrastructure in code and manage it through version control. This has many advantages over other methods, including reduced risk of human error and increased speed.
- Automation: The automation capabilities inherent in IAC are often understated, but they are one of its biggest strengths. Instead of having to manually provision new servers whenever a new application is deployed or scaled, you can simply tell your CI/CD pipeline what resources should be created when an event occurs (like deploying an application). This makes deployments faster and less prone to human error because there’s no longer any manual intervention required during this process.*
- Planned Change
The next advantage of using terraform is that it allows you to plan for the future. You can see what changes have been made, and you can make changes in the future with more confidence because it is easy to track the history of your infrastructure.
With terraform, you are able to make plans for both success and failure. If something goes wrong during deployment or if something needs to be changed later on, there is no reason for panic! You will know exactly what caused it (or how) so that when faced with similar problems again in the future, you will know how to fix them much faster than before. - Automation
One of the great advantages of Terraform is automation.
By creating a configuration file with variables, you can deploy the same configuration across multiple environments, such as staging and production, just by changing those variables. This means that you don’t need to manually update your configuration for each environment (which would be time-consuming and error-prone). Instead, you can automate this process by scripting it through Terraform commands. For example, if you want to change something in your infrastructure after deploying it with Terraform (such as turning on some features), then all you have to do is run a command which will tell Terraform how to make those changes automatically in your infrastructure! - Version Control
Terraform uses a file format called HCL (HashiCorp Configuration Language) for its configuration files. HCL is a human-readable and easy-to-read language similar to JSON, but it has some features which make it easier to write and read.
HCL is also easy to work with when you are part of a team. Terraform lets you use comments in your configuration files, so that other people can understand what you are doing without having to ask you about every line of code. If a change needs to be made or if there’s an issue, everyone understands how this affects the system as well—and they can help fix it right away! - Auditability
When it comes to auditing, terraform provides some great benefits. Because it uses a declarative language, you can see who made changes and when they were made. This is beneficial in the case of an outage or issue with your infrastructure because you can go back through your logs and see what changes have been made. Additionally, you’re able to see how your infrastructure has changed over time by looking at past versions of the codebase. - Remote State Files
Remote state files are a way of managing terraform state. Remote state files can be stored in S3, Azure, GCP, etc. These remote storage solutions provide the ability to collaborate and share files with other members of your team. - Reusable Code
Reusable code is another benefit of Terraform. It makes sense to use reusable code when developing software, because reusing code saves you time and reduces your costs. Reusable code also provides consistency across projects, which helps teams work together more effectively.
Reusable Terraform modules are easy to test in isolation using unit tests or integration tests (e.g., by running the module against a sandbox). Because these modules have been tested on their own, there should be no surprises when they’re used in production with other modules or at scale in a larger environment than what was tested previously. - Open Source
Deploying with Terraform is a great way to get started with infrastructure as code. You can use it for free and you won’t have to deal with vendor lock-in because you can use any provider that has Terraform integration. There are plenty of providers available, so you’ll be able to get the exact services you need without having to worry about whether or not they’re supported by your preferred platform.
You’ll also find that there’s lots of community support when using Terraform as well, which means you won’t have any trouble finding help if something goes wrong while setting up or deploying your infrastructure.
Lastly, there are many integrations available for Terraform, which means that it’s easy for developers to integrate their favorite tools and languages into their workflow without needing anyone else’s help! - Mature and Active Project
Terraform is a mature and active project. It has been actively developed since its inception in 2014, with more than 500 contributors and over 1,500 commits across all of its repositories. Terraform was also the first major tool to provide support for infrastructure as code and has been adopted by many large enterprises who want to manage their workloads at scale (including companies like Uber, Netflix, and Coinbase). By comparison, other popular tools like CloudFormation or AWS SAM haven’t seen nearly as much development or usage yet. - Works In Multiple Clouds Simultaneously And Multiple Cloud Providers
Terraform has a lot of features that make it easier to deploy code to multiple clouds at once. You can use the same exact code to deploy to AWS, GCP and Azure because they all support Terraform. This means you’re not locked into any one provider and can switch providers without having to rewrite your entire infrastructure.
Whether you’re building a new cloud-based infrastructure or trying to manage multiple deployments of existing cloud services, either for testing or for scale, terraform has a lot to offer. It easily manages your state as well as other resources to help you quickly create a functional infrastructure and deploy applications in response to events and user actions. The future of DevOps is within reach, and terraform can be an important tool to help us get there.
Further blogs within this The Advantages Of Deploying With Terraform category.