Terraform

Terraform by HashiCorp enables you to safely and predictably create, change, and improve infrastructure. It is an open source tool that codifies APIs into declarative configuration files that can be shared amongst team members, treated as code, edited, reviewed, and versioned.

Terraform is a simple and reliable way to manage infrastructure in AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, Digital Ocean and more IaaS (providers, in terms of Terraform). The main idea of such tools is to create reproducible infrastructure and Terraform provides DSL to describe infrastructure and then apply to different environments. Previously we used a set of Python and bash scripts to describe what create in AWS, described different conditions which checks if some resource exists in AWS and create if it's not. Actually, Terraform is doing the same underhood. This is an introduction which covers simple use case to create Alluxio cluster I used in the previous post.

Terraform supports a number of different providers, but Terraform script must be written every time for new provider.