Terraform for IaC management
1. Terraform for IaC management
In your cloud security career, implementing thoughtful infrastructure design will be critical. You can use infrastructure as code, or IaC tools, to help automate and manage your infrastructure components like networks, cloud-managed services, firewalls, applications, and other components. IaC tools give you a way to define resources using configuration files. Within these configuration files, you can define parameters, options, settings, and preferences for these resources. Terraform is a popular IaC tool that enables users to provision cloud resources by communicating with an application programming interface, or API. Terraform creates and manages resources through that code. Some of the benefits of using Terraform include automation, reproducibility, and consistency. Terraform can automate the process of building and managing your infrastructure, which can save you a lot of time and effort. Terraform can also help you to create reproducible infrastructure deployments. In other words, you can easily create the same infrastructure environment on different cloud platforms or on-premises. Additionally, Terraform ensures that your infrastructure is consistent across different environments, improving the overall reliability and security of your infrastructure. Terraform is a declarative tool, which means it defines what the desired state of the system is, including which resources you need, and what properties those resources should have. There are three steps to the core Terraform workflow. The first step is to write the infrastructure as code. This involves defining your desired infrastructure configuration using Terraform. Consider this scenario: As a cloud security professional, a developer team asks for your help in the building and deploying a virtual machine. They provide requirements and you use Terraform to write instructions to build the virtual machine. In this case you use a Google Compute F1 micro virtual machine. First, you designate your resource, then name your instance. Then, put in the machine type. So, now you have an IaC that is ready to preview. The second step is to run the Terraform plan command. In this step, you preview your configuration before you apply it. The focus of this step is to ensure that the feedback loop aligns to the design of your infrastructure and is error free. Please be aware that this step may be iterative. When building infrastructure, the development team should work together with the security team to build in policy-as-code using Terraform. You can use these policies to ensure the Terraform plan is compliant with past practices and security rules. For example, Terraform uses a tool called Sentinel to enforce policy on Terraform configurations. Sentinel uses a high-level, purpose built programming language to build policies. Benefits of policy as code include sandboxing, codification with comments for quick learning about policies, and version control. The Sentinel step happens between the planning and applying steps in the Terraform workflow. The third step is to run the Terraform apply command to provision the infrastructure. The focus of this step is for Terraform to communicate with the cloud provider to initiate the provisioning process. This involves the creation, modification, or deletion of resources based on the configuration in the IaC. It also determines the relationships between resources. It can use provider plugins to modify, create, and destroy resources on infrastructure providers. You can also use a single workflow to manage your infrastructure, but it will acknowledge the uniqueness of your provider. In this video, you learned that you can save yourself a lot of work by building and automating your infrastructure. So remember, tools like Terraform can help!2. Let's practice!
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