Ritesh Modi - Deep-Dive Terraform on Azure: Automated Delivery and Deployment of Azure Solutions

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Azure has matured as a cloud provider over a period of time. It provides numerous capabilities and helps organizations focus on their core business aspects while automating tasks based on standardization, consistency, and uniformity. Building and managing infrastructure is an important activity on Azure, and Terraform is one of the leading infrastructure-as-code (IaC) frameworks to effectively do so. It is one of the leading IaC platforms for managing a large variety of target environments. Terraform helps in managing the entire lifecycle of the infrastructure, from provisioning to teardown. Terraform and Azure providers are well maintained, are updated on a weekly basis with new resources and bug fixes, and have acceptance from a large community of developers.

Organizations need confidence and a high level of predictability when deploying on Azure. They want to implement changes to environments in a consistent manner, and Terraform helps achieve this using its idempotent deployments and configuration-based language. Terraform provides numerous concepts and artifacts that are used during both development and deployment. It internally manages idempotent deployments using a state file. Its scripting language is quite versatile and helps developers write easy to complex configurations. It is extensible and allows developers to add newer resources and author modular configurations that are generic and reusable across multiple deployments, environments, and solutions.

Bringing Terraform and Azure together is a win-win proposition for organizations and developers. It helps in easily automating the environment provisioning while ensuring that the process is quick, reliable, and cost-effective. This book is an attempt to educate readers about possible approaches for using Terraform alongside Azure. Each chapter builds on the prior chapter and slowly and steadily takes the reader through all the major concepts of Terraform in the context of Azure. After reading this book, readers who are new to Terraform will be able to start writing Terraform configurations, and experienced developers will be able to apply the Terraform best practices and write complex configurations.

This book is meant for both developers and architects to effectively implement and deploy environments using Terraform on Azure.

I hope readers will find this journey fruitful in their quest for learning and employ their newfound knowledge in their solutions and projects.

Happy learning!

Writing this book has been a fantastic experience. I owe a lot to the people who motivated me with their encouragement. I would like to thank so many people for making this book happen.

Thank you to the people who inspire me to push myself and who ultimately make everything worthwhile, the three wonderful ladies in my life: my mother, Bimla Modi; wife, Sangeeta Modi; and daughter, Avni Modi.

Thanks, of course, to the Apress team. I would like to thank my editors for providing direction at each stage of the publishing process and guiding me through it. I would also like to thank my technical reviewer who read the book multiple times and gave incredibly useful feedback. Finally, I thank everyone who has helped me learn both Azure and Terraform through numerous discussions and projects. This book wouldnt have been possible without each one of them.

Before the advent of cloud computing, most infrastructure environments were built manually. Building all the environments including the production environment was done by infrastructure engineers using manual techniques and processes. There was some scripting and automation, but even those scripts were executed manually. The infrastructure would generally not undergo changes and would be exclusively created and maintained by infrastructure engineers. There was not much need to scale the infrastructure, neither were there disruptive changes to it apart from failing hardware. This manual maintenance would work fine in most cases.