Terraform in DevOps – IaC, Workflow & Benefits

Terraform is a key infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tool in the DevOps ecosystem that automates infrastructure provisioning through code. It supports various cloud platforms and on-premises data centers through plugins called providers, which translate Terraform configurations into specific API calls for each platform. Terraform features include multi-cloud provisioning, remote state management, policy as code, reusability, drift detection, dependency management, parallelism, and environment management. The core Terraform workflow consists of writing the desired infrastructure in HCL, initializing Terraform, planning changes, applying changes, and destroying resources. Terraform is used in DevOps to automate the provisioning and updating of infrastructure as part of the application deployment process, integrating with CI/CD tools like Azure DevOps, Jenkins, GitLab CI, and GitHub Actions. Some key use cases for Terraform include cloud infrastructure provisioning, Kubernetes cluster deployment, serverless resource provisioning, network component configuration, multicloud deployments, auto-scaling group setup, and managing different environments. Implementing Terraform in a DevOps setting brings challenges such as the learning curve, security concerns, and potential for overcomplexity. Spacelift is an alternative to HashiCorp's Terraform that enables more advanced features like policies, multi-IaC workflows, self-service infrastructure, and integrations with third-party tools.