Terraforming with AWS (
TBA)

What is terraform

Terraform is IaC (infrastructure as code)

How does Terraform work with AWS?

• AWS has a ton of APIs readily accessible
• Terraform can help abstract those API in declarative coding syntax
• Terraform can hook into even more services besides AWS (such as Azure)
• Terraform is code agnostic

Example use case

I want to create the copy-paste standard of HA (high availability) applications in AWS. How can I do this?

Example use case

Copy github repo -> spin up many projects

Example use case

Version control your infrastructure code changes

Downsides to Terraforming

• Mental Overhead - You need to know how AWS works on top of writing Terraform.
• Discipling in the process - You need to modify your infrastructure in terraform, not directly on AWS. Else your terraform scripts are not in parity with what is on AWS
• More moving parts - to see changes in AWS, you have to do it in terraform first

Upsides to Terraforming

• Observability for how infrastructure has changed over time outside in a intentful fashion (e.g. looking at AWS logs for changes is too noisy)
• Makes it so your developers can deploy compiled code (like lambda functions) purely on a CLI
• A top level glance at what your entire AWS infrastructure looks like in a few .tf files

Example use case

How does terraform connect to AWS?

How does terraform connect to AWS?