Overview
Popular among developers and DevOps teams, Terraform allows you to orchestrate your infrastructure through the use of declarative configuration files and modules, instead of manually provisioning and configuring each resource. (This practice is also commonly referred to as Infrastructure as Code (IAC).)
Benefits of Infrastructure as Code
Infrastructure as Code offers the following benefits:
- Simplicity, speed, and consistency via automation
- With your infrastructure defined in code, you simply need to execute your IaC to create or update your environments. You do not need to create each individual resource at your cloud provider, or even login and configure them. Your IaC will complete all actions for you, from provisioning to configuring, without your input, allowing you to focus on developing your application, not provisioning your environments.
- Version control
- As your infrastructure is written in code, you can make use of version control software, such as git, which provide an auditable log trail of when, why, and who made changes to your infrastructure. This also allows you to test your changes before making them live, and a known good config to revert changes if you have any issues with your deployment.
- Time and cost savings
- Since automation technology handles the majority of the work, you can spend more time developing your application, rather than provisioning infrastructure.
Integrate StackPath with Terraform
Terraform has multiple integrations that allow you to interact with multiple platforms to provision your infrastructure. These integrations are known as providers. StackPath has released a Terraform provider that allows you to provision and update your Edge Compute resources with Terraform.
We have provided an example of how to create a multi-cloud load balancer at the edge using the StackPath, AWS, and GCP Terraform plugins on our API documentation.