Deploying Applications to the Cloud using Terraform (3 days)
This class is designed to teach DevOps engineers, Production Support staff and developers how to effectively use Terraform to manage infrastructure in a cloud environment. The course covers the best practices around the concept of infrastructure as code and then introduces how this can be best be applied using Terraform.
Prerequisites
- Basic AWS Cloud Skills would be beneficial
- Basic understanding of deployment practices would be beneficial
Contents
Infrastructure as Code and Automated Deployments
- What is IaC
- Approaches to IaC
- Terraform, Cloudformation, SAM and others
Infrastructure in Source Control – Git
- Introduction to Git
- Working with Git in the Enterprise
- Maintaining IaC in Git
- Triggering pipelines from Git hooks
Effective Git Usage
- Working with a local Git repository
- Working with a remote git repository
- Effective use of branching
- Handling conflicts
- Git best practices and pull requests
IaC and DevOps
- Performing automated deployments
- Blue / Green
- Canary
- In place rolling updates
Terraform Fundamentals
- Understanding how Terraform Works
- Setting up Terraform
- Deploying a single server using Terraform
- Deploying a load balanced cluster of servers using Terraform
Understanding the Terraform Language HCL
- Arguments and Blocks
- Identifiers
- Comments
- Encoding
- JSON syntax
- Style conventions
Terraform Datatypes
- Working with strings and numbers
- Working with collection types
- Working with object types
- Using variables as input and output values
Terraform Functions
- String and number functions
- Collection related functions
- Security related functions
- Network related functions
- File system and date related functions
Terraform Constructs
- Looping with for_each
- Working with counters
- The significance of depends_on
- Working with different Providers
- Using Meta-arguments
The Terraform CLI
- Understanding the core commands
- Validating using validate
- Using init, plan and apply
Working with Terraform Modules
- Using registry based modules
- Creating custom modules
- Publishing custom modules to a registry
Managing State using Terraform
- How do you know what you have
- Maintaining a registry of resources
- The Terraform enterprise solution
- Deploying, tracking and updating deployments using Terraform enterprise
Configuration Management with Ansible
- Introduction to Configuration management tools
- Automating configuration using Ansible
- Configuring servers using Ansible
- Deploying an updated application using Ansible
When to use Ansible or Terraform
- What should generally be done in Terraform
- What should generally done using Ansible
- Combining Terraform and Ansible
Extended Project
- You are provided a sample Spring/React fullstack application
- Deploy this application to AWS using either containers or EC2
- Set up an appropriate pipeline for updates to be deployed
