Terraform

Choosing between infrastructure-as-code tools CloudFormation and Terraform can be arduous. It’s helpful to have some advice from someone with practical experience scaling apps using both technologies.

When your app’s next iteration is ready to deploy, you have two choices: either stop the entire application and deploy the new version manually every time or build an automated zero downtime CI/CD deployment pipeline once.

In this article, Toptal Freelance DevOps Engineer Gaurav Kohli demonstrates the latter using the Jenkins-powered continuous deployment pipeline of a three-tier web application built in Node.js, deployed on AWS Cloud, and using Terraform as an infrastructure orchestrator.

Writing an application is only part of the story. In order for it to be of value, it needs deploying somewhere it can scale; it has to run with high availability, have backups, and so on. Deployment and infrastructure management isn’t a simple process. And Terraform does nothing to hide the complexity. However, it does make your infrastructure declarative and reproducible, like your code.

In this article, Toptal Freelance DevOps Engineer Radosław Szalski teaches us what Terraform is, how its components work, and how to configure an entire AWS Cloud solution in minutes using its configuration language.