Posts

• Feb 25, 2021

  Terraform Skeleton Part 6: Protecting State

  Part 5 moved Terraform’s operational infrastructure into a CloudFormation stack so that Terragrunt no longer manages the state bucket, lock table, and log bucket. Doing so offers us the opportunity to protect these resources in ways not supported by Terragrunt. We will capitalize on that opportunity today.

• Feb 17, 2021

  Terraform Skeleton Part 5: Remote State with CloudFormation

  Part 3 showed us Terraform requires some infrastructure itself to store remote state and discussed some limitations of using Terragrunt to manage the creation of that infrastructure. In part 4, we introduced more operational infrastructure for Terraform and began managing that infrastructure with CloudFormation.

• Feb 10, 2021

  Terraform Skeleton Part 4: Backend Role

  The previous entry enhanced the terraform skeleton with remote state storage using AWS S3 and DynamoDB. Access to the state was granted based on whatever AWS credentials were configured in the shell at the time terraform was executed.

• Jan 28, 2021

  Terraform Skeleton Part 3: AWS Backend

  Terraform uses state files to track the resources it creates back to resource definitions in your *.tf files. Each deployment has its own state. State is stored according to the backend configured for the deployment. Terraform uses a local backend for storing state on the local filesystem by default, which is what we’ve been using for part 1 and part 2 of the terraform skeleton series.¹ This works fine for a simple demonstration but is insufficient for production use because:

  1. Terragrunt stores local state in a terraform.tfstate file located underneath the .terragrunt-cache directory it creates within our deployment directory. ↩

• Jan 23, 2021

  Terraform Skeleton Part 2: Variables

  In part 1 of the terraform skeleton series, we set up a terraform repository that allows the team to apply infrastructure at any level: from individual stacks to entire environments. We build on that foundation in this post, adding a variable hierarchy that similarly allows definition and overriding of variables at each level of the infrastructure.

• Jan 17, 2021

  Terraform Skeleton Part 1: Organizing Terragrunt

  Terraform is my go-to infrastructure definition tool. I love that it enables declarative management of different Cloud, PaaS, and SaaS platforms with its unified HCL language and provider model. At times, however, I’ve wished it was easier to start a project off on the right foot.

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