Terraform and Packer - unified management of your clouds

The course is prepared for anyone who manages cloud infrastructure and does not want to prepare it manually. Terraform is a tool for unified infrastructure management in cloud services. It can prepare, modify, or drop a cloud or local infrastructure - including dependencies between components. One universal tool can be used to manage the infrastructure in different cloud environments. Packer is a tool used to prepare images of virtual machines for Terraform - again for different cloud providers and using various configuration tools - from Ansible to Zsh scripts. We will use Terraform and Packer during the training on practical examples.

Audience

Cloud administrators which want to move forward to their automation even more cloud environments. 

Course guarantor

Jiří Broulík

Jiří develops applications based on Blockchain technology and ensures their operation in public clouds. He currently works at KompiTech. He previously worked as a cloud engineer at Mirantis and was responsible for the design, deployment and management of cloud solutions such as Openstack and Kubernetes. In his free time, he enjoys family and sports.

Outline

Packer

1. Packer 

• Image creation
• What does Packer actually do?
• Installation, configuration

2. First crash

• Packer first start and first image
• Basic parts - builders, variables
• Provisioners - virtual machine configuration
• Post processors - transformation of the result

3. Recommended practices

• JSON templating
• Makefile
• Image parameterization

Terraform

1. Terraform

• First configuration
• Infrastructure as a Code concept
• First configuration file
• Creating and destroying of the infrastructure

2. Terraform basics

• Providers - Cloud, Multi Cloud and Local Services
• Resources 
• Outputs - Using Terraform run results
• Resource Dependencies
• Parallel Processing

3. Infrastructure Parameterization

• Variables
• Data lookups

4. Persistence

• Statefile - state of the infrastructure
• Dependency graph
• Targeting - managing only part of the infrastructure

5. Modules

• Create and use a custom modules
• Terraform Module Registry

6. Work in a team

• Shared status
• What to do when things go wrong?
• Variable sharing between infrastructure pargs
• Workspaces
• Git and Terraform

Prerequisites of the participant

• Basic infrastructure knowledge - networking basics, load balancers, virtual machines.
• Command line basics.
• Experience with Amazon Web Services (AWS) is an advantage.
• You can use your own laptop or provided computer for work.

Used technologies in labs

• AWS
• Packer
• Terraform