SE Hangout

Solutions Engineering Hangout: Terraform on Azure for Beginners

Watch this demo for getting started with Terraform and Azure. There's useful info for Terraform beginners and advanced users.

Speakers

  • Sean Carolan
    Sean CarolanSolutions Engineer, HashiCorp

Terraform doesn't require software engineering skills to provision many different cloud services from several different cloud vendors like Azure, AWS, and GCP.

In this hangout, we focus on using Microsoft Azure. Microsoft has invested heavily in building integrations for Terraform. HashiCorp Solutions Engineer, Sean Carolan, gives a beginner-level demo for quickly setting up Azure and its ARM (Azure Resource Manager) templates with Terraform.

Questions asked during this hangout

  • I understand that ARM templates (in JSON) have their own complexity and issues. There might be some complexities in Terraform as well. Could you highlight some of those?
  • How can Terraform templates and state files be managed in a larger organization?
  • Is Terraform binary common for all the cloud providers? Can we have different providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP in a single Terraform file?
  • If we have already invested a lot of time in building our standardized ARM Templates, are there any benefits to learning and then recreating them in Terraform when we are currently a single cloud shop?
  • If we need to move from one cloud provider to another (within Terraform), how easy is the migration within Terraform (provider specific syntax)?
  • Can you explain the main.tf and State files? What is the scope of the state file? What happens if state files get deleted?
  • If Terraform can also configure installing applications into machines, why use Ansible? How does Terraform differentiate from Ansible and Chef?
  • Can you add a frontend layer to Terraform (Jenkins, Rundeck) to enable non-developers to deploy infrastructure by simply filling out variables in a web portal?
  • We're about to start using Terraform for our Azure infrastructure at work. What are some of the difficulties when working with Terraform as a team?
  • How much effort is it to switch a template from say AWS to Azure or from Azure to AWS?
  • How do I protect sensitive data, like secrets, in the Terraform state files?
  • We manage our infrastructure with Terraform, and the creation of the containers and the applications on that. How do you manage multiple Terraform state files?
  • How do we make changes to existing infrastructure that we built manually via Terraform?

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