front matter
forewords
In theory, we should all have identical production and test systems that are kept in sync every time there is a change. We should also apply updates regularly, track vulnerabilities, perform change management, have backups, and do all this while making sure not everyone has root access to every machine and features are delivered quickly and without a hiccup.
In practice, at least one of these very often suffers when the infrastructure is maintained manually. No matter how many fancy new toys we have been given over the years, be that the virtualization craze of 2010; containers; or, more recently, Kubernetes clusters, setting up and maintaining infrastructure manually is already painful. Setting up and maintaining the same infrastructure multiple times for testing, staging, and other environments is nigh on impossible.
This is where infrastructure as code (IaC), and specifically Terraform and OpenTofu, comes in. IaC promises that it will take a recipe—a blueprint if you will—and apply it to your servers or cloud environment. Configure an SSH key, hit a button, and it will roll out over hundreds of machines. No longer will you need to think about which machines the new colleague needs access to. The best part is that the recipe to do so and all changes to it can live in a version control system, giving you easy access to the history of changes that happened over time.