Provisioning Infrastructure as Code Through Microsoft Backed Terraform  

• Quick and reliable public cloud deployments using Terraform
• Enables users to describe public cloud environments in code

OK, the secret is out (our CTO Alex gave a talk about it, you can watch it below). One of the reasons Hentsū can deploy environments so quickly and reliably is because of the tools we’ve selected.  We’ve been using HashiCorp Terraform to describe, deploy and maintain public cloud environments since the company was founded. So we were glad to see Microsoft recently announced a multi-year partnership with HashiCorp to enhance the Terraform Provider for Azure. This is great news for Terraform users, like Hentsū, who have already benefited from using the Infrastructure as Code method of provisioning.

What Exactly is Terraform?

Terraform enables us to describe public cloud environments in code (HashiCorp Language). Terraform can then compare a public cloud account to the code and create a plan of changes to bring the environment up to date. If the plan is acceptable it can then be applied by Terraform to create, update or delete infrastructure resources such as networks, routing tables, firewall rules and virtual machines. It does this rapidly with as much parallelisation as possible leading to a slick, reliable and iterative way of deploying and maintaining public cloud environments. Deploying additional environments (test, staging, production) becomes a copy & paste exercise, or we create reusable modules. Using a code versioning system, like Git, we can version control a public cloud environment and even rollback to a previous version if, for example, a firewall rule change didn’t have the desired result. Changes can be codified on a separate code branch, and a pull request and approval required to promote changes to the master branch. This makes for a robust change management workflow for business-critical production environments. The code commit history provides an audit trail of who changed what, and the commit notes describe why. Terraform requires administrative credentials to make changes to public cloud environments. Storing these securely is a challenge so we prefer to generate short lived credentials that are usable for maximum 1 hour. Also, as part of a release pipeline, a scheduler like Teamcity or Jenkins can apply approved changes on behalf of IT and development teams.

Hentsū and Terraform

Microsoft backing HashiCorp only confirms that using Terraform to provision resources on cloud platforms is becoming the standard way of deploying infrastructure. Hentsū has first-hand experience using the software to deploy infrastructure successfully for its clients.

How Hentsū can Help

Want to discuss using Terraform software to deploy onto the cloud? Contact us at: hello@hentsu.com