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submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[-] [email protected] 22 points 3 months ago

I felt completely lost. What is Terraform?

Terraform is a tool that codifies cloud APIs into declarative configuration files to automate infrastructure provisioning and management

Not exactly sure what that means, but that may help someone!

[-] [email protected] 39 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Terraform is part of a movement called "Infrastructure as Code" (IaC) which allows engineers to define their cloud infrastructure using code.

This is extremely useful as it allows you to:

  • version infrastructure changes

  • automate resource and configuration creation and management

  • have reproducible environments (think production and staging envs, or deploying a new production env to another datacenter)

Terraform (and OpenTofu) is different to most IaC project as it is agnostic of cloud providers: you can use it to deploy infrastructure to multiple providers, where their competitors are limited to their own platform (I think of AWS's Cloud Development Kit)

[-] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

it is agnostic of cloud providers: you can use it to deploy infrastructure to multiple providers

Nicely put. I frequently see the first part of this sentence and not the second. (Maybe I only pay attention to the first part and then disappoint myself...)

Terraform/Tofu allow me to use the same basic syntax and to have one project that controls AWS/GCP/K8s/my home servers, but I cannot use it to describe "a running server process" and just deploy that on any of those places. Instead I'd need to have like aws_beanstalk_service { ... } and gcp_application { ... } and kubernetes_manifest { ... } and systemd_service { ... } and the contents of those blocks would be totally different (and I'd need a bunch of different ancillary blocks for each of those).

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this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2025
67 points (95.9% liked)

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