Terraform in Depth: Infrastructure as Code with Terraform and OpenTofu

An in-depth guide to everything Terraform, complete with newly established best practices and experienced insights into Infrastructure as Code.

Terraform and its open-source fork OpenTofu’s “Infrastructure as Code (IaC)” approach has redefined the way you manage your infrastructure. Its premise is simple-yet-awesome: provision, update, scale, and replicate your infrastructure with the same ease as your application code. In Terraform in Depth, you’ll discover absolutely everything you need to automate and manage your infrastructure with just a few lines of code.

Inside Terraform in Depth, you’ll learn how to:

• Understand and write basic Terraform code
• Avoid vendor lock-in with the open source OpenTofu
• Switch between OpenTofu and Terraform as needed
• Construct continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines for Terraform
• Organize Terraform projects and modules for team-based, production use
• Develop and test robust Terraform modules
• Create custom Terraform providers

Terraform in Depth is fully up to date with the latest versions, standards, and approaches of Terraform and OpenTofu. Complete and comprehensive, its one-stop approach covers everything from Terraform and OpenTofu’s absolute basics all the way to advanced production uses. Every technique is illustrated with the kind of real-world examples infrastructure engineers encounter every day.

Forewords by Anton Babenko and Christian Mesh.

About the technology

Terraform and its open-source fork OpenTofu practically eliminate manual infrastructure configuration. With the Terraform infrastructure management tool, even complex operations that used to require kludgy scripts and time-sucking tinkering can be created, managed, and shared as an organized codebase. Master Terraform, and you’ll be able to update a fleet of machines with just a few lines of code.

About the book

Terraform in Depth teaches Terraform techniques and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) practices that you can use to deploy and manage applications in the cloud or your on-prem data center. Each chapter includes interesting hands-on examples, such as creating a flexible Terraform module and debugging Terraform plans. You’ll quickly learn to define your infrastructure with Terraform. Then, you’ll dive into advanced applications, including CI/CD pipelines, creating tools for documentation and security, and Terraform code management.

What's inside

• Understand and write basic Terraform code
• Avoid vendor lock-in with OpenTofu
• Construct CI/CD pipelines
• Develop and test Terraform modules

About the reader

For sysadmins, software developers, and cloud engineers famil- iar with the CLI.

About the author

Robert Hafner has led engineering efforts at numerous startups, including Malwarebytes, Vicarious AI, and Rad AI. He is currently a Distinguished Engineer at a Fortune 100 Telecom.

Table of Contents

Part 1
1 A brief overview of Terraform
2 Terraform HCL components
3 Terraform variables and modules
4 Expressions and iterations
5 The Terraform plan
Part 2
6 State management
7 Code quality and continuous integration
8 Continuous delivery and deployment
9 Testing and refactoring
Part 3
10 Advanced Terraform topics
11 Alternative interfaces
12 Terraform providers

Robert Hafner has led engineering efforts at numerous startups, including Malwarebytes, Vicarious AI, and Rad AI. He is currently a Senior Principal Architect at a Fortune 100 Telecom in their Developer Experience organization. In his career, he has built large-scale infrastructure with reliability typically reserved for large organizations, while utilizing small, focused teams. When he’s not working with computers, he’s creating resin art or trying something new in the kitchen. He lives in Chicago with his amazing wife and two cats.