1. Introduction

Welcome to the Terraform training lab!

What is Terraform?

Terraform is an open-source infrastructure-as-code software tool created by HashiCorp, that provides a consistent CLI workflow to manage hundreds of cloud services. Terraform codifies cloud APIs into declarative configuration files.

Useful Links

• Terraform Docs
• Terraform Registry & Modules
• Terraform Tutorials

Terraform Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC)

Terraform code is written in HCL (HashiCorp Configuration Language) which is technically not source “code” but configuration. The definition of all resources for your infrastructure is defined in .tf files in the same directory. Sub-directories are used to store parameters or Terraform modules, but we’ll come to that later.

The filename does not serve special purpose; Terraform internally merges all files ending with .tf. Choose filenames which are expressive and meaningful for other engineers to navigate your code.

A typical project structure looks as followed:

• main.tf
• variables.tf
• outputs.tf
• versions.tf
• [component].tf

In the next lab chapters you will create these files and understand what to place in these files.