Simplifying the Complex - by Kamran Shah

Terraform one of the famous open source tool used for planning, deploying and maintaining infrastructure as a code and the beauty of this tool is that it works across various cloud service providers. Even though I personally like the AWS Cloudformation, it is AWS only and most probably it will always remain limited to Amazon Web Services. It has few advantages over other tools when using with AWS and will be the first to have new AWS features incorporated before other tools and APIs catch up. However if you are not limiting yourself to AWS only or have hybrid environment you may want to use a 3rd party tool compatible for all cloud infrastructures. Terraform being one of them is youngest client only tool and this article will help you setting up your desktop environment and give you understanding of how it works before you can start to code. Prerequisites: Computer running Windows, Linux, Solaris or MacOS operating system. Downloads: Download Terraform directly from the crea

Contents of main project file - mainproject.tf ############################################################### # A Mini project file to create a single instance using # variables and paremeters listed in terraform.tfvars file. # Please make sure that both files have correct extensions and # live within same directory for terraform to run without any # additional parameters. A typical execution plan will include # following commands or steps; # terraform init  # terraform plan  # terraform apply  # terraform destroy ############################################################### ############################################################### # Variables used in this script ############################################################### variable "aws_access_key" {} variable "aws_secret_key" {} variable "aws_private_key_path" {} variable "aws_key_name" {} variable "aws_instance_ami" {} variable

So while some of organisations may have security concerns, others may want to take benefit from economy of scale and may want to migrate from on-premises (in-house or colocated) hosting to cloud infrastructures such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud platform (GCP) or Microsoft's Azure etc. In reality, security should be your real concern for all types of infrastructures. While public cloud is open to world and requires stringent security controls within cloud, your on-premises data stored on encrypted disks requires more or local access and physical security controls. There are benefits of cloud and flexibility or pay as much as you use would suit most of its tenants. There are cases where cloud could become too expensive for certain applications where on-premises infrastructure may be beneficial for your organisation, however you are talking an extreme scale here. Majority of enterprise solutions are still hosted on on-premises infrastructure and some are sceptic a