Advanced Terraform - 3 Days

• An understanding of cloud infrastructure concept
• Basic experience in Terraform operations

Audience

• DevOps engineers
• System administrators
• System architects

Terraform, by Hashicorp, is a configuration orchestration tool for building and managing infrastructure on and off the cloud.

This instructor-led, live training (online or onsite) is aimed at beginner-level to advanced-level DevOps engineers, system administrators, and system architects who wish to enhance their Terraform skills and proficiency in managing complex infrastructure deployments.

By the end of this training, participants will be able to:

• Develop and maintain Terraform projects at scale.
• Demonstrate expertise with HCL and some of the more-advanced expression language capabilities and practices.
• Utilize various automation tools and processes for managing Terraform ops in continuous integration and delivery pipelines, including testing and quality assurance tools and processes.
• Act as an expert in any existing or new Terraform project or module.

Format of the Course

• Interactive lecture and discussion.
• Lots of exercises and practice.
• Hands-on implementation in a live-lab environment.

Course Customization Options

• To request a customized training for this course, please contact us to arrange.

Terraform Core Concepts Review

• The CLI and all available sub-commands
• The flow of Terraform operations
• State and its importance (as well as fragility)
• Hashicorp Configuration Language (HCL), pre 0.12 and post 0.12

Designing More Complex Terraform Projects and Modules

• Approaches to Modularization
  • Single-project, multi-module scenarios
  • Multi-project related infrastructure, single and hybrid cloud or platform
  • Root module decomposition
    • Working with new and legacy monolithic projects alike, approaches to thoughtful Terraform project organization

Developing and Managing More Complex Terraform Projects and Modules

• Comprehensive best practices
• Module versions
• Share and focus on DRY
• Complex provider scenarios across projects and modules
• Introduce Terraform Null Label and its utility

An Introduction to Make + Makefile

• Automate repetitive tasks in Terraform projects using a reliable, standard linux tool

Advanced Terraform tool and CLI understanding

• Understand state and the state file
• State migration, management in complex scenarios
• Terraform import approaches in complex scenarios
• Approach mistakes and messes
  • Drift that's gotten out of hand
  • Corrupted or irreparable state
  • Know what can't be fixed
  • Proactively ensure that you don't end up in this position with Terraform

HCL Advanced Topics

• Advanced configuration language expression features:
  • Re-usability approaches
  • Loops, meta-arguments
  • For expressions
  • Types in the context of expressions

Hardening Security for Terraform

• Shift left Terraform security, defense in depth
• State files and security
• Manage credentials and secrets: least privilege, rotation, protection
• Where and how security can break down in Terraform workflows

Reliability of Infrastructure and Testing

• What automated and manual testing frameworks and methods are available currently?
  • The current state of affairs leaves a lot to be desired, e.g. terratest
• Drift and mitigate unexpected consequences in realistic scenarios
• Developer responsibility vs automated testing, git hooks for validation, terraform-pre-commit, etc.

Automating Terraform, Terraform in Pipelines

• Terraform with Spinnaker
• Use automated delivery pipelines to improve quality assurance, stability, and reliability of infrastructure and Terraform deployments
• Terraform and GitOps: approaches to adopting GitOps in Terraform workflows
• Terraform Cloud and Enterprise overview, a look at how these offerings improve Terraform workflows and what other tools/processes exist out there to serve the same need: custom CI/CD pipelines for Terraform, tools like Atlantis, etc.

Complex AWS infrastructure with Terraform

• Designing and deploying VPCs with Terraform
• Managing EC2 instances and other compute resources
• Configuring AWS networking components
• Integrating AWS services into Terraform-managed infrastructure
• Implementing security best practices for AWS resources

Summary and Next Steps