Yevgeniy Brikman - Terraform: Up & Running

This book is for anyone responsible for the code after it has been written. That includes sysadmins, operations engineers, release engineers, site reliability engineers, DevOps engineers, infrastructure developers, full-stack developers, engineering managers, and CTOs. No matter what your title is, if youre the one managing infrastructure, deploying code,configuring servers, scaling clusters, backing up data, monitoring apps, and responding to alerts at 3 a.m., thisbook is for you.

Collectively, all of these tasks are usually referred to as operations. In the past, it was common to finddevelopers who knew how to write code, but did not understand operations; likewise, it was common to find sysadmins whounderstood operations, but did not know how to write code. You could get away with that divide in the past, but in themodern world, as cloud computing and the DevOps movement become ubiquitous, just about every developer will need tolearn operational skills and every sysadmin will need to learn coding skills.

This book does not assume that youre already an expert coder or expert sysadmina basic familiarity with programming,the command line, and server-based software (e.g., websites) should suffice. Everything else you need youll be able topick up as you go, so that by the end of the book, you will have a solid grasp of one of the most critical aspects ofmodern development and operations: managing infrastructure as code.

In fact, youll learn not only how to manage infrastructure as code using Terraform, but also how this fits into theoverall DevOps world. Here are some of the questions youll be able to answer by the end of the book:

• Why use IaC at all?

• What are the differences between configuration management, orchestration, provisioning, and server templating?

• When should you use Terraform, Chef, Ansible, Puppet, Salt, CloudFormation, Docker, Packer, or Kubernetes?

• How does Terraform work and how do you use it to manage your infrastructure?

• How do you create reusable Terraform modules?

• How do you write Terraform code thats reliable enough for production usage?

• How do you test your Terraform code?

• How do you make Terraform a part of your automated deployment process?

• What are the best practices for using Terraform as a team?

The only tools you need are a computer (Terraform runs on most operating systems), an internet connection, and thedesire to learn.