Slides for my "Terraform modules and best-practices" talk on meetups during September 2018. Some links from the slides: https://www.terraform-best-practices.com/ https://cloudcraft.co/ https://github.com/terraform-aws-modules/ https://github.com/antonbabenko/modules.tf-lambda

1. Terraform, modules and more
by Anton Babenko
September 2018

2. Agenda
• Introduction
• Frequent Terraform Questions
• Terraform Modules
• Q&A
• Bar/coffee talk

3. Anton Babenko
Terraform AWS fanatic
Organise {HashiСorp, AWS, DevOps} User Groups in Norway
DevOpsDays Oslo (29-30th October 2018)
I 💚 open-source — github.com/antonbabenko
• terraform-community-modules + terraform-aws-modules
• antonbabenko/terrapin — Terraform modules generator
• antonbabenko/pre-commit-terraform — make your configurations nicer
• antonbabenko/modules.tf-lambda — from visual diagram to Terraform
• antonbabenko/terraform-best-practices
twitter.com/antonbabenko linkedin.com/in/antonbabenko medium.com/@anton.babenko

4. October 22-24, 2018 | San Francisco
Use the code HUG-COM20TK1 for 20% off
your General Admission ticket

5. Application Delivery with HashiCorp
https://www.hashicorp.com/resources/application-delivery-hashicorp
Write
Test
Package
Provision
Deploy
Connect
Secure

6. Write, plan, and create infrastructure as code
www.terraform.io

8. Google Cloud
Deployment Manager
Azure Resource
Manager

9. Write, plan, and create infrastructure as code
www.terraform.io

10. Plus100+moreproviders
Write, plan, and create infrastructure as code
www.terraform.io

11. Why Terraform and not AWS CloudFormation,
Azure ARM, Google Cloud Deployment Manager?
• Terraform manages 100+ providers, has easier syntax (HCL), has native
support for modules and remote states, has teamwork related features, is an
open-source project.
• Provides a high-level abstraction of infrastructure (IaC)
• Allows for composition and combination
• Supports parallel management of resources (graph, fast)
• Separates planning from execution (dry-run)

12. Terraform’s Goals
• Unify the view of resources using infrastructure as code
• Support the modern data center (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS)
• Expose a way for individuals and teams to safely and predictably change
infrastructure
• Provide a workflow that is technology agnostic
• Manage anything with an API

13. Terraform — is a universal tool to manage
anything that has an API
• GSuite resources
• Dropbox user files
• New Relic alerts
• Datadog users, monitors
• Jira issues
• See All Terraform providers

14. What are the tools/solutions out there?
• Terraform Registry (https://registry.terraform.io/) — collection of public Terraform
modules for common infrastructure configurations for any provider.
• Terraform linter to detect errors that can not be detected by `terraform plan` —
https://github.com/wata727/tflint
• Terraform version manager — https://github.com/kamatama41/tfenv
• A web dashboard to inspect Terraform States — https://github.com/camptocamp/
terraboard
• Jsonnet — The data templating language — http://jsonnet.org

15. Atlantis — Start working on Terraform as a team
A unified workflow for collaborating on Terraform through GitHub, GitLab and Bitbucket
https://www.runatlantis.io

16. Terragrunt
Thin wrapper for Terraform that provides extra tools for working with multiple Terraform modules
https://github.com/gruntwork-io/terragrunt/
No logo found
Check issue #570
for details

17. How to handle secrets in Terraform?
• Can you accept secrets to be saved in state file in plaintext? Probably not.
• AWS IAM password & access secret keys — use PGP as keybase.io
• AWS RDS — set dummy password and change after DB is created
• AWS RDS — use iam_database_authentication_enabled = true
• EC2 instance user-data + AWS KMS
• EC2 instance user-data + AWS System Manager’s Parameter Store
• AWS Secrets Manager
• https://github.com/opencredo/terrahelp
• Other options:
• Secure remote state location (S3 bucket policy, KMS key)

18. How to integrate Terraform with …?

19. Terraform Modules
https://www.terraform-best-practices.com/key-concepts

20. Types of Terraform modules
Resource modules (terraform-aws-modules, for eg):
• Create resources (obviously)
• Few relations to other modules (usually)
• Very flexible
Infrastructure modules:
• Use specific version of resource modules
• Company-wide standards (eg, tags and names)
• May use code generators (jsonnet, cookiecutter, etc)
Compositions:
• Use specific version of infrastructure or resource modules
• Provide all the values for region, environment, module, etc
• Terragrunt is awesome
https://www.terraform-best-practices.com/key-concepts

21. Traits of good Terraform modules
• Clean code
• Feature-rich
• Sane defaults
• Tests
• Examples
• Documentation
• … (secure, versioning, lifecycle-readiness)
Read more: https://medium.com/@anton.babenko/using-terraform-continuously-
common-traits-in-modules-8036b71764db

22. Collection of Terraform AWS modules supported by the community (100+ contributors).
More than 1,5 million downloads since September 2017.
(VPC, Autoscaling, RDS, Security Groups, ELB, ALB, Redshift, SNS, SQS, IAM, EKS, ECS…)
github.com/terraform-aws-modules
registry.terraform.io/modules/terraform-aws-modules

25. cloudcraft.co features
• Manage AWS components in browser (EC2 instances, autoscaling groups, RDS, etc)
• Connect components
• Import live AWS infrastructure
• Calculate the budget
• Share link to a blueprint
• Export as image
• Embed drawing to wiki, Confluence, etc

28. Infrastructure as code generator — from visual diagrams to Terraform

29. ✓ cloudcraft.co — design, plan and visualize
✓ terraform-aws-modules — building blocks of AWS infrastructure
✓ Terraform — infrastructure as code

30. modules.tf notes
✓ Deployed for beta users: https://cloudcraft.co/app?beta
✓ Generates potentially ready-to-use Terraform configurations
✓ Suits best for bootstrapping
✓ Enforces Terraform best practices
✓ Batteries included (terraform-aws-modules, terragrunt, pre-commit, …)
✓ 100% free for all & open-source (https://github.com/antonbabenko/modules.tf-lambda )
✓ Want to sponsor, or a sticker? Contact me.

31. What’s next?
• Involve more people and use code-generators
(Terrapin, modules.tf)
• Terraform refactoring (Terrible)
• Dependency hell problem with modules
• Get acknowledgement and support from AWS
• Your ideas?

32. What is your Terraform question or
problem?
Hints: Testing? Versioning? Code structure? Working as a team? CI/CD?
Automation? Integration with other tools? modules.tf ? Terrible? Code
generation? Missing tools/features? Syntax sugar (features and types of
variables)? How to contribute?

33. So, how to get started with Terraform?
• https://www.terraform.io/intro/getting-started/
install.html
• Follow instructions in README.md, check
examples, open issues and pull requests
• Maybe read a book ("Getting Started with
Terraform" or "Terraform Up & Running")
• Try hands-on arcade — https://play.instruqt.com/
hashicorp/tracks/terraform-arcade

34. Thanks! Gracias! Grazie!
anton@antonbabenko.com
twitter.com/antonbabenko