Scott Winkler - Terraform in Action

Scott Winkler

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ISBN: 9781617296895

To my lovely fianc and future wife, Beatrice.

When Mitchell Hashimoto and I founded HashiCorp, we sought to build a portfolio of tools to cater to practitioners in the new cloud ecosystem. Provisioning was a critical piece, and we knew we wanted to build something special. When we designed Terraform, we had three goals in mind. First, we wanted a consistent and simple workflow, regardless of the platform. Second, we wanted to ensure high confidence and no surprises for users. Finally, we wanted the tool to be extensible so it could support just about anything.

I first met Scott as a conference speaker for HashiConf, our annual user conference. Scott was speaking about how Ellie Mae was using Terraform Enterprise and the patterns and best practices it had implemented to enable a large organization to adopt an infrastructure as code practice. Scott continues to be an active contributor to the Terraform ecosystem and has contributed a novel provider for Minecraft, a shell provider, and dozens of modules in the public registry.

I was incredibly excited when Scott reached out about writing a book on Terraform because he brings a depth of experience using and contributing from small projects to a large enterprise setting. This book does a great job of providing a gentle introduction for entirely new users of Terraform, but it quickly gets to more complex and realistic patterns. The chapter on deploying a multi-tier application on AWS delivers a strong prescription around modules to provide encapsulation and abstraction along with best practices for file and folder layouts.

Subsequent chapters go further in showcasing Terraform for layers above IaaS, such as serverless platforms and CI/CD pipelines. This gives the reader a sense of the wide applicability of Terraform and how to apply infrastructure as code to higher-level resources. Advanced patterns like zero-downtime deployments with Blue/Green and canary patterns are covered and are invaluable for production infrastructure where changes must be made with live traffic. Beyond just using Terraform, Scott discusses how to collaborate in a team environment using modules, remote state, and Terraform Cloud.

For readers who are so inclined, the book also provides pointers for how to contribute to Terraform by building custom providers. While most users are unlikely to author providers, the book shows how simple the process is and can be a useful reference if you find the need to support a custom internal system or novel resource.

Scott is an expert on Terraform, and this book distills hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of practice into practical advice that is easy to follow. The book is a great guide for new users and readers hoping to learn best practices, and it can serve as a reference guide on more complex patterns. You will find the investment in Terraform in Action fruitful wherever you are on the journey to mastery.

I hope you enjoy the book, and best of luck Terraforming!

Armon Dadgar, Co-Founder and CTO, HashiCorp

When I started writing this book, Terraform 0.12 was months away from being released. I was one of the lucky people who gained early access to an alpha prerelease candidate, but it wasnt as useful as you might expect. None of the existing providers were compatible with Terraform 0.12, so I couldnt use any resources or data sources. What little experimenting I could do was restricted to input variables, output values, and expressions. Some good did come out of this, because eventually I was able to develop a simple templating engine that would later become the foundation for chapter 3.

As much as possible, I tried to be on the cutting edge when writing this book. The problem with always being on the cutting edge is that you never know whats going to rain on your parade next. On multiple occasions, I had to rewrite entire chapters because a new feature was released that broke something or new design patterns became available that made my code obsolete. Its exciting to work with emerging technologies, but it can also be frustrating.

Even today, there is some volatility in Terraform, but I feel that its finally settling down. Terraform has matured enormously and today is used by hundreds of thousands of engineers across the globe to manage billions of dollars worth of infrastructure. Dont get me wrongchange is still happening. But its not as radical or fast as it once was. Even with Terraform 1.0 on the horizon, I dont think there will be any drastic changes, based on what we already have in Terraform 0.15. But maybe Ill have to eat my words someday.

Im glad to have written this book, and I feel its more important now than ever before because the popularity of Terraform is exploding and people need a practical guide on using it to solve real-world problems. You can find many introductory guides on how to get started with Terraform, but what if you want to take your skills to the next level? Thats what this book is for. I can say with confidence that this is the most advanced book on Terraform available at the moment. My hope is that this book will inspire you to do great things with Terraform.