What this book covers

Chapter 1, Infrastructure Automation, covers infrastructure automation in general, why is it needed at all (with a list of the main reasons to do it) and which tools exist to solve this problem. By the end of this chapter you will know which problem Terraform solves and why it is the best tool for particular infrastructure automation tasks.

Chapter 2, Deploying First Server, walks through all the necessary steps to install Terraform, gives a short overview of AWS and EC2, and explain in detail how to create your very first EC2 instance with Terraform.

Chapter 3, Resource Dependencies and Modules, explains one of most important features of Terraform: dependency graph. You will figure out how dependencies work and see it in practice by extending the template from previous chapter. At the moment we find out our template is too big, we will use Terraform modules to DRY our code and also use more advanced dependency features.

Chapter 4, Storing and Supplying Configuration, teaches how to make Terraform templates more configurable. You will see all the possible ways to supply data to Terraform templates, to basic variables to using any external data source.

Chapter 5, Connecting with Other Tools, talks about how you can connect Terraform templates to external tools. It shows how to combine Terraform and Ansible, Puppet, or Chef, how to provision servers, and how to run Inspec tests against them.

Chapter 6, Scaling and Updating Infrastructure, dives deep into managing existing infrastructures with Terraform. It gives an overview of the various ways to perform updates with Terraform and explains what Immutable Infrastructure is and how to use it with Terraform. It gives a full example of performing both rolling updates and blue-green deployments, as well as tricks on running smaller updates.

Chapter 7, Collaborative Infrastructure, provides best practices of using Terraform in a team. It shows how to refactor and split Terraform templates into remote modules, how to organize your code to be re-usable, and how to handle sensitive data inside Terraform templates. It also teaches how to do full Continuous Integration of a Terraform-based infrastructure.

Chapter 8, Future of Terraform, speculates on the future of Terraform. It also recaps everything learned so far and gives some extra thoughts and hints on topics that were too small too deserve a separate chapter.