How to Manage On-premise Infrastructure with Terraform

Terraform is a versatile infrastructure-as-code tool that can be used to manage both cloud and on-premise environments. It works with the APIs of various service providers and systems, allowing it to be used with on-premise systems such as VMware vSphere, OpenStack, and Kubernetes. While there are no technical differences between managing on-premise and cloud resources using Terraform, there are some limitations when using on-premise infrastructure, including finite resource availability, scalability challenges, and increased maintenance responsibilities for the user. The process of configuring Terraform for virtualization platforms, bare metal servers, and Kubernetes on-premise is outlined in this text, along with examples demonstrating how to use Terraform providers and write code for each scenario. Spacelift, a powerful CI/CD workflow tool, can be used to manage Terraform better by providing features such as policies, multi-IaC workflows, self-service infrastructure, and integrations with third-party tools.