Benefits of Terraform
Whether you're looking to write infrastructure as code or want to deploy custom cloud providers, Terraform is the go-to tool for writing automation. It's a powerful IaC tool that helps DevOps teams automate the provisioning of all infrastructure across multiple cloud platforms, including AWS, Azure, and GCP.
In addition to the many benefits of deploying and managing infrastructure through IaC, Terraform also supports software-defined networking (SDN). This helps reduce network configuration and deployment times by automatically configuring and updating networks based on the applications running on them.
Multi-Environment Management
Managing multiple environments is an important task for many organizations. Using Terraform to manage these environments ensures consistency and control for each environment. This eliminates the need for your DevOps team to spend time on manually infrastructure provisioning, which ultimately saves you money.
Configuration Drift:
Most infrastructure as code tools generate mutable infrastructures that change as new servers or middleware are added to the environment. This is known as configuration drift and can cause security lapses if the configuration is not correctly implemented.
Immutable Infrastructure:
Terraform provisions an immutable infrastructure, which makes it more resilient to configuration drift. It keeps a state file that tracks the changes to resources, and uses it to create an incremental execution plan that takes into account the accumulated changes. The state file can be stored locally or in a remote-backed system like an s3 bucket. It's this feature that allows users to rollback to an older version of the configuration if needed.