DevOps: Terraform & AWS CloudFormation

Infrastructure as code (IaC) is the process of managing and provisioning computer data centers through machine–readable definition files, rather than physical hardware configuration or interactive configuration tools.

The IT infrastructure managed by this process comprises both physical equipment, such as bare–metal servers, as well as virtual machines, and associated configuration resources.

The definitions may be in a version control system. It can use either scripts or declarative definitions, rather than manual processes, but the term is more often used to promote declarative approaches.

What is Terraform?

Terraform is a tool for building, changing, and versioning infrastructure safely and efficiently. Terraform can manage existing and popular service providers as well as custom in–house solutions.

Configuration files describe to Terraform the components needed to run a single application or your entire datacenter. Terraform generates an execution plan describing what it will do to reach the desired state, and then executes it to build the described infrastructure. As the configuration changes, Terraform is able to determine what changed and create incremental execution plans which can be applied.

What is AWS CloudFormation?

AWS CloudFormation is a service that gives developers and businesses an easy way to create a collection of related AWS and third–party resources, and provision and manage them in an orderly and predictable fashion.