Whizlabs hosted a webinar on “CI Automation on Terraform” on 22 January 2022 with Mehul Sharma (Senior DevOps consultant) and Aastharai (Senior DevOps consultant).
About the Speakers
Mehul Sharma, a Senior DevOps consultant at OpsTree Solutions. He is a tech enthusiast and has a keen interest the latest DevOps practices. He is passionate about training, and continues to conduct workshops and corporate training. He is an Azure Developer Community Organiser and an Open-Source contributor to Azure Terraform Modules, Ansible, and other Azure Terraform Modules.
OpsTree Solutions’ DevOps Consultant is Aastharai. She is an active contributor to the Jenkins plugin and loves to learn about the latest DevOps practices. She is passionate about technology and loves to share her knowledge with others through training sessions.
Let’s take a look at the Webinar’s highlights in detail.
What is Terraform?

According to HashiCorp’s official website, Terraform stands for Infrastructure as Code (IaaC).
Terraform is a tool that helps us to build the infrastructure needed for all of these platforms.
What are the steps?
Safely and efficiently, build, change, version, as well as the application of these modifications to the infrastructure.
Why Terraform?
Let’s say that a testing team wants a Monday Infrastructure for a brief period of time. They ask their CIS admins for help in setting up an infrastructure for their testing scenario. After the CIS admins have completed the work, they will demolish the infrastructure. If the testing team wants to use the same infrastructure again, they will again go to the CIS team for the same work. The CIS teams want the testing team to be able to provide their own infrastructure while reducing the costs. They will give them limited access to infrastructure provisioning to enable the testing team become self-sufficient in provisioning small infrastructures for their needs of development or testing.
This is more like a person giving himself a high-five.
How does Terraform ensure safety and speed?
Let us consider a small scale scenario.
You will need to provision a virtual machine in your infrastructure. You will then move on to the GUI, whether it is Azure, AWS, and any other. Next, you will need to click some buttons and set some variables. The EC2 machines will then be available for support.
However, if you have to provision 100 virtual machines and VP2 instances, you can’t go back to the GUI every time. This will not only cause you to misspell the variable, put long checks, and make it difficult to check the checks. It will also affect the infrastructure.
Here, Terraform comes into play. Terraform is a tool that allows you to go through your code one by one and make decisions about variable names, checks that you need, and those that you should not. Terraform allows you to quickly and safely deploy your entire Infrastructure in seconds.
Why Terraform?
We have seen coders all over the world pushing their code towards a Version Control System.
Now we have a code called “Infrastructure as a Code”, which should be on the version control so that we don’t have to pass the folders around. Once we have all Terraform on the Version Control System we can extract all the good stuff.
If you want to improve your infrastructure and need to add a module or make changes to an existing one, and you want to move forward with it, you have two options:
It will move forward, we can continue with the code.
It will not move forward. You will need to delete all data and recall all steps taken. Terraform allows you to simply move a commit back or a certain number. You can keep going until you get the code running perfectly and it is ready to be deployed.
Validity
If you have the infrastructure state in code, you can run automated tests and code reviews on every change. These are some of the best practices to reduce the risk of errors.
Reusability
Terraform Registry is an example. All the modules that have been created are available for reuse. You only need to search for them and make sure you don’t forget about them. This allows you to create something new, rather than working on the same thing over and over again, and moves the company around in a familiar circle.
Happiness
Unless there is creativity, the person who manages infrastructure doesn’t usually get an appraisal.

Oswald