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Understanding the Basics of Terraform Providers

Understanding the Basics of Terraform Providers

Understand “providers” to manipulate cloud resources.

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At its heart, Terraform is a platform for reconciling an expressed desired state with an external system. The way Terraform interacts with external APIs is through plugins called providers. A provider is responsible for describing the schema for its exposed resources, and implementing Create, Read, Update, and Delete (CRUD) interactions with external APIs. Providers enable Terraform to express nearly any external API’s resources as Terraform resources.

Through its thousands of community and verified providers, Terraform is able to manage resources including databases such as Redis, Cassandra, and MongoDB, cloud infrastructure for all major cloud service providers, communication and messaging services such as Discord and SendGrid, and a vast number of other providers. If you are interested, you can explore a listing of them in the Terraform Registry. You can simply write, plan, and apply your way to your desired infrastructure.

In this lesson, we will build on our experience of using a local provider and extend what we learned to use a provider that interacts with an external API. We will define the desired state for a set of cloud resources and provision them. We will need an Azure account for this lesson.

Defining and provisioning cloud resources

Imagine that we want to deploy infrastructure to our cloud service provider. In this case, we're going to use Microsoft Azure via the hashicorp/azurerm provider. Let's start by authoring a simple main.tf file like the following:

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# Configure the Azure provider
terraform {
  required_providers {
    azurerm = {
      source  = "hashicorp/azurerm"
      version = "~> 3.0"
    }
} }
provider "azurerm" {
  features {}
}
resource "azurerm_resource_group" "mygroup" {
  name     = "mygroup"
  location = "southcentralus"
}

The preceding Terraform configuration file requires the hashicorp/azurerm provider and defines a resource group named mygroup in the ...