Introduction to the Course

A brief overview

Let’s imagine a scenario where we need to quickly set up a hundred servers. If we approach this task manually, it means we’ll have to set up each server one after the other. This process consumes time and it’s a strenuous exercise, especially when we have to do this periodically. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a way of writing our infrastructure state as code and enables us to rapidly provision and deploy infrastructure on demand. Terraform, a popular IaC tool, comes in handy in setting up infrastructure across different cloud platforms and even container-based solutions. Throughout this course, we’ll look at the benefits it offers us.

Who is this course for?

This course is for those who want to learn IaC best practices and explore the benefits of Terraform as an effective tool for seamless infrastructure automation. The course is targeted at learners who want to learn the core concepts of the HashiCorp Configuration Language for the creation, modification, and deletion of IT resources.

Prerequisites

This course lays the foundation for how to manage enterprise infrastructure in an automated fashion using Terraform. Familiarity with cloud resources, especially on Amazon Web Services (AWS), and a basic understanding of programming are needed.

Why take this course?

We’ll go into the details of the underlying concept that drives IaC and gain insight into popular tools like Terraform for achieving infrastructure automation.

Course learning outcomes

By the end of this course, we’ll go into the details of what IaC is all about, the problems that IaC aims to solve, and the popular tools used for IaC. We’ll get a feel of IaC using a popular tool called Terraform. We’ll explore what Terraform is all about, the importance of the Terraform state file, what Terraform variables and expressions are, and how to use Terraform provisioners. Then we’ll wrap things up by looking at the problems that the Terraform backend solves and get hands-on practice by working on a project where we deploy resources on AWS using Terraform.