Terraform helps in creating cross-cloud immutable infrastructure with code. As with most code there is an ideal of having your codebase automated with tests and deploys. How can this work with terraform? Does it work in a sensible way to give you confidence in your changes and how they ultimately get applied? Trying to answer these questions led to the following approach that I’ve used to attempt to try having a CI/CD solution for a terrorm codebase.

Terraform is a very versatile tool to help automate your infrastructure and codify your infrastructure as code. With a large open source community and tons of providers across multiple cloud platforms it allows developers to create plans for spinning up infrastructure effortlessly. One thing I ran into that needed a little more effort was adding conditional steps to a configuration plan. Due to the complex nature of Terraform and how it attempts to plan out how it will execute your configuration it is a little more involved to get conditionals working.

Ansible is a provisioning tool to easily help you get your infrastructure under control. One of the key elements in Ansible is a role. There are public roles to get you started quickly with Ansible over at Ansible Galaxy. One thing Ansible is sort of lacking is a strong testing approach for open source roles.