Thinking back to the early days of having to stand in a datacenter with a CD in hand, ready to build 25 servers by morning, chilled air flowing up through the floor, no where to escape except a folding chair in a corner of a fenced in cage. Brrrr. Ahhh…cloud automation. How the comfort of a cup of coffee in one hand, well okay sitting on the desk just out of the way of spilling on the keyboard (done that enough times now to just reach further away for a sip). I need to deploy a few dozen servers, in the next 30 minutes. Well hello Terraform, my long lost friend. I have modules too, oh wow, now I can really speed things up.

Cloud providers

It’s hotly debated if you only have one provider to deploy your services to like AWS, GCP or Azure is it worth the time and effort to really spend all that time to build your infrastructure in multiple offerings. For some that’s an easy case of yes, others not so much. Of course we all know that if you don’t build it and don’t need it, then sure enough you may find a case when you do when your single provider goes down. It has happened. But with the push towards dockerizing applications, this becomes a more plausible case of a “hey a go application in a docker container on a server in AWS is the same as a go application in a docker container in GCP and Azure” and on down the list you can go. The resources and infrastructure might vary slightly and yes some differences of DNS, routes taken, hardware, linux and others, but all in all it would provide a much deeper reliability or redundancy or (pick your type of recovery names).

CI/CD

With (Ci/Cd or CI/CD) tools like Jenkins, Azure Devops, CircleCi and many others they have opened the door to make repeatable tasks just that. Build it once and deploy many times using the same pipeline. Yeah okay, we know the pipeline constantly changes in most development shops, but it’s still a lot easier to use. All of these tools have lots of integration components, API access and have made picking the solutions of cloud providers much easier.

Terraform

So while having a pipeline works well, Terraform http://terraform.com has made the repeatable task of building infrastructure that much easier. More will follow on the next post.