Part 2 Terraform in the wild

Now the fun begins (at least, depending on your idea of fun). We spend the next few chapters investigating real-world Terraform design patterns as they pertain to three major cloud providers (AWS, GCP, and Azure). Part 2 ends with an ambitious multi-cloud deployment that demonstrates the real power of Terraform. Although you may not like the idea of switching to unfamiliar clouds, I encourage you to persist, as the skills learned here are universally applicable. Here’s what to expect.

Chapter 5 is a refreshing first look at the Azure cloud and emerging technologies. We walk through the design process of architecting and deploying a serverless web application with Terraform. By the end, you should feel comfortable writing your own Terraform configurations, even those that do not follow conventional patterns.

Chapter 6 explores Terraform’s ecosystem and play-nice rules. How do you manage remote state storage? How do you publish modules on the Terraform Registry? Where do proprietary services like Terraform Cloud and Terraform Enterprise fit in? All these questions and more are answered in this chapter.

Chapter 7 introduces Kubernetes and the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). We deploy and test-run a CI/CD pipeline for running containerized applications on GCP. We also cover some of the neat tricks you can do with local-exec provisioners.