Following on from a previous post where I installed and configured Terraform, see How to Install Terraform, in this post I will continue my journey learning Terraform by going through the process of installing a useful tool known Azure command-line interface (Azure CLI).
The Azure command-line interface (Azure CLI) is a set of commands used to create and manage Azure resources. The Azure CLI is available across Azure services and is designed to get you working quickly with Azure, with an emphasis on automation. It’s a useful tool to have installed on my machine so let’s get started.
Welcome to part 1 of Terraform on Azure. My journey on learning Terraform to allow me to automate workloads within Microsoft Azure. If you’ve not already done so, please subscribe to stay up to date on the latest blog posts.
Let’s get started 🙂
What is Terraform? Terraform is a tool for building, changing, and versioning infrastructure safely and efficiently. Terraform can manage existing and popular service providers as well as custom in-house solutions. Terraform is a tool and also a language. That language is called Hashicorp Config language (HCL). Terraform is written in Go (also known as GoLang) is an open-source programming language designed by Google.
Configuration files describe to Terraform the components needed to run a single application or your entire datacenter. Terraform generates an execution plan describing what it will do to reach the desired state, and then executes it to build the described infrastructure. As the configuration changes, Terraform is able to determine what changed and create incremental execution plans which can be applied.
Terraform can be used to automate the provisioning of cloud infrastructure. Terraform will allow you to write and deploy your cloud infrastructure setup in code. If you have experience with Microsoft Azure or other cloud providers such as AWS, Google Cloud etc, you will know that deploying infrastructure using the Microsoft Azure Portal is a manual and repetitive task which an be time consuming. Terraform helps automate your builds by using Infrastructure as Code, rather than manually going through the steps in the portal.