Full Stack Journey 027: Understanding Infrastructure As Code And Terraform With Curt Micol

On today’s Full Stack Journey, Curt Micol (@asenchi on Twitter) joins Scott to talk about the notion of infrastructure as code, Terraform, and some of Curt’s ideas around “defensive Terraform.”

Curt is an SRE at Heptio.

Scott and Curt discuss:

• The concept and benefits of infrastructure as code
• Why it’s important to get institutional knowledge out of people’s heads and into some kind of repository
• Terraform and how it works
• What is “defensive Terraform”?
• Why remote  state is so critical
• How the concept of DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) makes it harder for users to be successful with infrastructure as code and Terraform

Some of the ideas and techniques discussed here run counter to popular opinion on the Internet. If you’re interested in infrastructure as code, don’t miss this episode!

Show Links

Terraform – Terraform.io

Terraform, VPC, and why you want a tfstate per env – Charity.wtf

Presentation by Curt on Terraform best practices in a team environment (contains links to YouTube recording of the presentation)

Datanauts 137: Automating Infrastructure As Code With Terraform – Datanauts

Infrastructure as Code – Kief Morris/O’Reilly Media