Articles tagged with "terraform"

AWS Setup: Secure Identity Foundation with Terraform When it comes to access management in AWS, often I see a basic setup, with Users in IAM, as described here. Clearly, most people focus on building actual running applications, at first. After the first running POCs, the next migrations are on the road map; your architecture evolves, but the initial IAM setup stays. So it’s better to have a super secure set-up right from the beginning.

CloudFormation does not cover all AWS Resource types. Terraform does a better job in covering resource types just in time. So if you want to use a resource type which CloudFormation does not support yet, but you want to use CloudFormation, you have to build a Custom Resource with an own Lambda Function. CDK to the rescue: use AwsCustomResource.

“Infrastructure definition has to be declarative”. Let’s see where this presumption gets us. My guess why some ops guys prefer pure terraform or CloudFormation is that these languages seem to be easier to understand. There is precisely one way of creating a specific resource in the language. If you use a programming language, there are many ways to solve one specific problem. The problem which could occur later in the project is that both declarative languages have boundaries in what they can do, with a programming language you do not have these boundaries.

Managing multiple environments in Terraform Introduction I recently started learning Terraform. For those who haven’t encountered it: Terraform is in essence a framework to describe Infrastructure as code by Hashicorp. When I began doing that, I was struggling with the staging-concept of Terraform. I did my research and came upon numerous 1 articles and blogs that described ways to manage (multiple) environments or stages in Terraform2. Since I wasn’t really happy with the other solutions and there didn’t seem to be a canonical way to handle multiple environments, I decided to try and figure out my own solution.

Note: An updated version of this post is available here Building Lambda Functions with Terraform Introduction Many of us use Terraform to manage our infrastructure as code. As AWS users, Lambda functions tend to be an important part of our infrastructure and its automation. Deploying - and especially building - Lambda functions with Terraform unfortunately isn’t as straightforward as I’d like. (To be fair: it’s very much debatable whether you should use Terraform for this purpose, but I’d like to do that - and if I didn’t, you wouldn’t get to read this article, so let’s continue)

Wer träumt nicht davon das Infrastructure as Code Framwork zu benutzen, das die eigenen Anforderungen bestens erfüllt? Aber wie findet man nun dieses eine richtige Framework für seinen Anwendungsfall, den “Alleskönner” oder den “Spezialisten”? Auch wir bei tecRacer haben immer wieder mit unterschiedlichsten Infrastructure as Code Frameworks zu tun. Bei unseren Projekten im AWS Umfeld steht uns eine große Zahl an möglichen Tools zur Verfügung. Aber worin genau besteht der Vorteil von Infrastructure as Code Frameworks gegenüber einer manuellen Bereitstellung von Infrastruktur-Resourcen?