The Terraform Validator
1. The Terraform Validator
Let’s think back to the Terraform workflow, and explore the validate phase. Between the plan and apply phases, is the option to validate. During this phase, pre-deployment checks are run against organizational policies. The Terraform validator is a tool for enforcing policy compliance as part of an infrastructure CI/CD pipeline. It’s also incredibly useful in an infrastructure-as-code environment, as it helps mitigate configuration errors that can cause security and governance violations. Although validation is optional, The Terraform Validator is a useful tool in an IaC environment. Businesses are shifting toward infrastructure-as-code, and with that change comes the risk that configuration errors can cause security and governance violations. Furthermore, many organizations have compliance and governance policies in place that must be adhered to. For example, perhaps there are data residency laws in place, and your governance team must ensure that resource creation is only allowed in certain regions. To address this policy, the security and governance teams can set up guardrails. These guardrails are in the form of constraints. Constraints define the source of truth for security and governance requirements. Constraints must be compatible with tools across every stage of the application lifecycle, from development, to deployment, to auditing. The Terraform Validator is run by executing the gcloud beta terraform vet. Executing the command enforces policy compliance as part of an infrastructure CI/CD pipeline. The tool retrieves project data with Google Cloud APIs, so you can accurately validate your plan. You can use the Terraform Validator to detect policy violations and provide warnings or halt deployments before they reach production. The same set of constraints that you use with the tool can also be used with any other tool that supports the same framework. gcloud beta terraform vet is different from the terraform validate command. Terraform validate is used for testing syntax and the structure of your configuration without deploying any resources. The Terraform Validator is used to ensure that the configuration adheres to the set of constraints. These constraints automate the enforcement of the organization policies. With The Terraform Validator you can: Enforce policies at any stage of application development Remove manual errors by automating policy validation And reduce learning time by using a single paradigm for all policy management Let’s examine a few Terraform Validator use cases, and show how it can help different teams. Platform teams can easily add guardrails to infrastructure CI/CD pipelines, to ensure that all requests for infrastructure are validated before deployment to the cloud. This limits platform team involvement by providing failure messages to end users during their pre-deployment checks. These messages tell you which policies they have violated. Application teams and developers can validate their Terraform configurations against a central policy library to identify misconfigurations early in the development process. Before submitting to a CI/CD pipeline, you can ensure that your Terraform configurations are in compliance with organizational policies, thus saving time and effort. Security teams can create a centralized policy library that is used by all teams across the organization to identify and prevent policy violations. Depending on how your organization is structured, the security team or other trusted teams can add the necessary policies needed to meet compliance requirements.2. Let's practice!
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