Why Terraform?

I learnt Terraform years ago, before the licensing problem that made OpenTofu, which I am still yet to try.

I use it to provision the physical part of the infrastructure that makes up a web project.

It works like a state machine, where it translates what you wrote down into the API commands to run with your specified provider to get you those things.

Reproducible

There are a few things that go into my website, and now they’re all laid out in code.

In theory I can run

terraform apply

and my infrastructure will end up as what I wrote down.

Version controlled

As code I get the benefits of keeping the current state of my infrastructure in version control:

• pull requests for changes
• history of changes
• SemVer
• an audit trail

All in one place

I set some of my infrastructure up years ago and had forgotten I needed so many TXT records on my domain.

It wasn’t until I checked to write this that I realised I had so many.

Keeping my setup in one place helps me keep an eye on it all.