Terraform: how to init your infrastructure

Terraform: how to init your infrastructure Build • Jules Martin • 21/07/22 • 10 min read

Hi everyone! I’m Jules, Developer Relations Manager at Scaleway, and today I am going to show you how Terraform is going to change the way you currently manage your cloud infrastructure. If you want to quickly and easily set up a cloud infrastructure, one of the best ways to do it is to create a Terraform repository. You will then be able to deploy your resources in a few clicks.

Terraform is an open-source, Infrastructure-as-Code tool that helps you manage your infrastructure at any time, deploy it/delete it in just one click, and work with other developers on your projects. Previously, I worked as a Solutions Architect for different projects, and it really helps me keep track of my work, the infrastructures that I deployed and also allows many developers to work on the same project easily.

Before starting on the project, you need to have an account , your credentials all set up, and install Terraform on the server you are using, or locally, using the last version of the Scaleway Terraform provider .

Best practices to structure a Terraform environment

First, let’s create our workspace. Even if it is not at all mandatory, Terraform developers like to organize their repository to easily find their resources. It also allows you to store your data in a unique location, depending on the environment you want to deploy your infrastructure in (you can have a repository for your development infrastructure, etc.).

Now we are going to create four different files:

main.tf: will contain the main set of configurations for your project. Here, it will be our instance

provider.tf: Terraform relies on plugins called “providers” to interact with remote systems

backend.tf: each Terraform configuration can specify a backend, which defines where the state file of the current infrastructure will be stored. Thanks to this file, Terraform keeps track of the managed resources. This state can be stored locally or remotely. Configuring a remote backend allows multiple people to work on the same infrastructure

variables.tf: will contain the variable definitions for your project. Since all Terraform values must be defined, any variables that are not given a default value will become required arguments

terraform.tfvars: allows you to set the actual value of the variables

For the time being, let’s just create these four files and fill the backend and the provider as in this example:

terraform { backend "s3" { bucket = "XXXXXXXXX" key = " terraform .tfstate" region = "fr-par" endpoint = "https://s3.fr-par. scw .cloud" skip_credentials_validation = true skip_region_validation = true } } /* For the credentials part: ==> Create a ~/.aws/credentials: [default] aws_access_key_id= aws_secret_access_key= region=fr-par */ CopyContentIcon Copy code terraform { required_providers { scaleway = { source = "scaleway/scaleway" version = "2.2.0" } } required_version = ">= 0.13" } CopyContentIcon Copy code Organize your files properly on Terraform

Besides the code we are providing you with, our Terraform directory consists of several other files, created by the Terraform provider itself, to keep your infrastructure on tracks:

.terraform/ : this directory contains the providers pulled down to local. It will be re-created when terraform init is run in a new environment

terraform.tfstate and terraform.tfstate.backup: these files contain the Terraform state specific to a specific environment. These files may contain sensitive information stored in plain text from the previous deployment

terraform.tfvars : may contain secrets (usernames, password, IP addresses, etc.) about a specific environment

We should take steps to avoid check-in of such files. Indeed, there is some content you really do not want to display (like with many other programming languages). For this, we can use a .gitignore file and mention the extension of such files.

Team work on Terraform

An important thing to know about Terraform is that it stores the resources it manages into a state file. There are two types of state files: remote and local. But how do we work when we use a remote state file? What keeps us from deleting what our amazing coworkers have deployed into their infrastructure? The combinaison of a backend + a remote state! Where local state is great for an isolated developer, remote state is absolutely necessary for a team, as each member will need to share the infrastructure state whenever there is a change.

So, each time a change is applied, the state is updated with new values: creations, deletions, and updates.

Knowing that, we can assume that it is going to be much more convenient to set up a backend for each developer so they can participate in our Terraform project. In our case, we will set up an Object Storage bucket to store our backend (do not forget to set up your bucket credentials in ~/.aws/credentials).

Don’t forget to create your bucket before creating your backend . This is the only thing you have to do by yourself in the console, or via the API, before launching your project.

Deploying our first resources: instance + block

Here, we are going to fill our main.tf with our instance resources.

For this part, we are going to launch our first instance with an IP and a volume attached to it.

resource "scaleway_instance_ip" "public_ip" {} resource "scaleway_instance_volume" " scw -instance" { size_in_gb = 30 type = "l_ssd" } resource "scaleway_instance_server" " scw -instance" { type = "DEV1-L" image = "ubuntu_focal" tags = [" terraform instance", " scw -instance"] ip_id = scaleway_instance_ip.public_ip.id additional_volume_ids = [scaleway_instance_volume. scw -instance.id] root_volume { # The local storage of a DEV1-L instance is 80 GB, subtract 30 GB from the additional l_ssd volume, then the root volume needs to be 50 GB. size_in_gb = 50 } } CopyContentIcon Copy code Also, do not forget to fill your variables.tf and your terraform.tfvars:

variable "zone" { type = string } variable "region" { type = string } variable "env" { type = string } CopyContentIcon Copy code zone = "fr-par-1" region = "fr-par" env = "dev" CopyContentIcon Copy code To finally launch our infrastructure, let’s switch on our terminal and write these three commands:

Terraform Init

Terraform plan

Terraform apply

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