Terraform is infrastructure as code software that allows users to define and provision infrastructure in a code format. It enables infrastructure changes to be made in a consistent and repeatable way. The document discusses what Terraform is, why infrastructure as code is useful, details about Terraform like its development by HashiCorp and open source nature, how platform agnostic it is in supporting multiple cloud and virtualization platforms, alternatives like CloudFormation and Ansible, how to use Terraform including running commands, and advice for using it in production environments.

1. Terraform
Terrible or Formidable?

2. Hello!
James Kingsmill
DevOp at Geoscience Australia
twitter: @jameskingsmill
hangops/github/bitbucket: aynsof

3. What is Terraform?
- Infrastructure as code
- Desired state
- Orchestration

4. Why infracode?
- Enable change
- Divergent environments
- Recover from failure
- Replicable architectures

5. Terraform - gory details
- HashiCorp
- Go
- OSS on Github
- 7600 stars
- 900 contributors
- 17,000 commits

6. Who is HashiCorp?
- Vagrant, Packer, Consul,
Serf, Nomad, Vault
- ‘We've never lost 9s betting on a
HashiCorp product.’ - Mozilla
- ‘HashiCorp is Atlassian for DevOps’ -
Some Person

7. Why do I care?
- Simple and easy(ish)
- Modular
- State storage, statefile locking
- Planning
- Automatic dependency management
- Open source
- Platform agnostic

8. How platform agnostic?
- AWS
- Google Cloud Platform
- Microsoft Azure
- Bare metal
- Alibaba Cloud
- Plus Many More

9. PostgreSQL
PowerDNS
ProfitBricks
RabbitMQ
Rancher
Random
Rundeck
Scaleway
SoftLayer
StatusCake
Spotinst
Template
Terraform
Terraform Enterprise
TLS
Triton
UltraDNS
Vault
VMware vCloud Director
VMware vSphere
GitHub
Google Cloud
Grafana
Heroku
Icinga2
Ignition
InfluxDB
Kubernetes
Librato
Logentries
Mailgun
New Relic
Nomad
NS1
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure (Legacy ASM)
MySQL
OpenStack
OpsGenie
Packet
PagerDuty
Alicloud
Archive
Arukas
AWS
Bitbucket
CenturyLinkCloud
Chef
Circonus
Cloudflare
CloudStack
Cobbler
Consul
Datadog
DigitalOcean
DNS
DNSMadeEasy
DNSimple
Docker
Dyn
External
Fastly
How platform agnostic?

10. GA’s infracode journey
- AusPost and InfraViewer
- Amazonia
- Re-evaluation

11. Alternatives
Cloudformation
- Declarative
- JSON
- Lock-in

12. Alternatives
Troposphere/Sparkleformation/Amazonia
- Improvement on Cloudformation
- Smaller communities
- 150 contributors
- 14 contributors
- ~2 contributors

13. Alternatives
Ansible
- Limited support for AWS
- Procedural

14. How does it work?
- Hashicorp Configuration Language
- Human readable
- JSON compatible

15. What does it look like?

16. What does it look like?

17. What does it look like?

18. Run it!
terraform init
terraform get
terraform plan
terraform apply

19. Live demo

20. Running in production
- Pipelines
- Automated testing

21. Running in production

22. Automated testing

23. Automated testing

24. Issues?
- Declarative to the death

25. Issues?
- Heavy duty
- Terragrunt
- TF 0..9
- State files
- Cleanup
- Stardust

26. Advice?
- Treat modules as functions
- Tag resources and use a cleanup script
- Separate state files
- Automated tests (duh)

27. Formidable.
- Buying in
- Auscors
- Geoscience Portal, eCat, Earthquakes, Sentinel
- Self-serve
- Workshops & example architectures
- Ecosystem

28. Learning more
- Terraform: Up and Running - Yevgeniy Brikman (O’Reilly)
- charity.wtf - Charity Majors (@mipsytipsy)
- hangops - #terraform

29. Thanks!
James Kingsmill
twitter: @jameskingsmill
hangops/github/bitbucket: aynsof