Multi-cloud deployments can be challenging as many existing tools for infrastructure management are cloud-specific.
Terraform is cloud-agnostic and allows a single configuration to manage multiple providers and handle cross-cloud dependencies. This simplifies management and orchestration, which helps operators build large-scale multi-cloud infrastructures.
Terraform is an orchestrator, meaning that it supports many providers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, GitHub, MySQL, and other types of services like Kubernetes and Datadog.
Operators ascribe a topology of their desired infrastructure state in the Terraform template using HCL. The syntax of the Terraform language consists of only a few basic elements, as stated below.
resource "aws_vpc" "main" {cidr_block = var.base_cidr_block}<BLOCK TYPE> "<BLOCK LABEL>" "<BLOCK LABEL>" {# Block body<IDENTIFIER> = <EXPRESSION> # Argument}
The use of variables makes it easy to customize the infrastructure as code for cloud credentials and cloud regions.
For those looking to get started, the public Terraform registry provides infrastructure modules for many infrastructure resources at registry.terraform.io.
The Terraform workflow has two parts:
terraform plan to see what will be provisionedterraform apply where infrastructure is actually provisioned.Terraform then automatically reconciles resources dependent on one another, provisions those resources in order, and then provisions all other resources as efficiently as possible.
There are currently over 100 Terraform providers available in a community of over 1,100 contributors. Each Terraform provider uses the infrastructure-specific APIs to harness the full capabilities of the resources being provisioned.
Overall, Terraform is an open source and cloud-agnostic orchestration tool with salient features.
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