Organizing infrastructure and the various teams involved can create confusion and headaches. Terraform is an excellent tool for managing infrastructure as it gives you easy control over all your infrastructure from one place.
As part of our effort to provide customers with more tooling to help them manage their infrastructure in a simple and reliable way, we have just released the first version of our provider plugin for Terraform. In this blog, we explain everything you need to know, including the benefits of Terraform.
What is Terraform?
Terraform is a very popular infrastructure-as-code software allowing its users to define in a declarative way the desired state for their infrastructure. Based on this definition, Terraform is then able to automatically call the necessary APIs to reach this state via the use of provider specific plugins.
Our Application Programming Interface (API) is always the most flexible tool available for users. But instead of building custom integration around it for one’s needs, it is sometimes simpler
and more efficient to leverage the power of an existing specialized tool.
With the introduction of our own Terraform provider plugin, we offer an additional option to our customers for managing their infrastructure using all the features that Terraform has to offer.
The Benefits of Terraform
As a DevOps Engineer, streamlining your work has never been easier with Terraform. Automating tasks and reusing processes makes managing infrastructure significantly easier. Changing any processes is done simply by updating and applying the Terraform code.
Terraform is Declarative
As mentioned earlier, Terraform describes the intended outcome rather than the steps needed to achieve that outcome. Therefore, Terraform does the heavy lifting in determining the best way to achieve the desired goals.
Terraform Does Not Have an Agent
Most automation tools are agent-based and therefore need agent software for you to configure servers. However, because Terraform is agent-free, this software is not required, making Terraform easier to install and use.
How to Access Leaseweb’s Terraform Plugin
Our provider plugin is listed in the Terraform registry with the code available on GitHub.
In this first release, only a limited set of the dedicated server features are available as resources and data sources, including:
- dedicated server installation
- bandwidth and data traffic notification settings
- credentials management
- reverse lookup on server main IP
Other dedicated server resources and other products are expected to be added later such as the management of private networks, DNS, and IPs.
Please note that the plugin is currently released as a beta 0.x.x version which will we keep on improving as we gather user feedback. As such it is possible that some resources might change significantly as we work towards a more stable 1.0.0 version. We will make sure to inform you of those changes in the Changelog.
Conclusion
For Leaseweb customers who are already familiar with Terraform, we invite you to jump directly into the standard plugin documentation to discover in detail what is already available to you. For more information about Terraform itself, please check its official documentation.
Have a go at our plugin and tell us about your experience! Let us know in the comments which features you are missing the most so that we can prioritize it for the next release.