What is CloudOps and Terraform?

A month ago, I got a little taste of CloudOps workflows. I wrapped a project on provisioning infrastructure using the Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool, Terraform and thought to do a little recap of my learnings. This was all new to me prior to the project so let’s break it down.

What exactly is CloudOps?

CloudOps is the practice of automating the processes of delivering software in the cloud using cloud computing services like AWS. It is a way of managing your infrastructure with more agility.

What is Terraform?

Terraform is a declarative way of creating and managing your resources by writing the “instructions” in code. And by that, Terraform is an Infrastructure as Code language.

So, say you want a new application to run in a specific environment or region, you simply write that in code and Terraform has a smart way of looking at what you give it, look at the state of your aws infrastructure and create that resource.

It is a super powerful tool that is agnostic and makes it easy to scale a product especially if you depend on multiple different cloud services.

Terraform was created by Hashicorp and has amazing documentation so be sure to read up on it if you’re learning Terraform.