Infrastructure as Code with Terraform and Friends
2016-01-12
Abstract
We have long since passed the time when it was feasible for human beings to manually provision, configure, and manage infrastructure. Automation is clearly the way forward, as we have known for years. However, it is difficult to determine how to effectively utilize automation in a way that reduces complexity rather than contributes to it. An automated mess is only marginally better than a manual mess.
Infrastructure as Code is a holistic approach to automation that seeks to reign in the ever-increasing complexity of modern infrastructure by borrowing practices from the software development community.
In this talk, we’ll start with a discussion of the concepts central to Infrastructure as Code. Then we’ll take a tour of the various tools, technologies, and practices that help us interact with infrastructure as code. Finally, we’ll take a deeper dive to look at concrete examples from Terraform (https://terraform.io/), the project I work on full time.