terraform

Infrastructure as code automates cloud resource deployment by defining your infrastructure in code files, enabling version control, reproducibility, and consistent environments. Terraform uses declarative configuration to provision AWS EC2, EKS, and other resources through plan and apply workflows, eliminating manual setup.

Terraform state management tracks deployed resources and requires remote backends with locking to safely handle multi-environment deployments. Configure remote state (S3, Terraform Cloud) and workspaces to isolate environments, apply environment-specific variables, and prevent concurrent modifications across teams.

Terraform modules bundle reusable infrastructure patterns into self-contained configurations that accept input variables and produce consistent outputs. Create modules for common patterns like VPCs or Kubernetes clusters, version them, and reuse across projects to standardize deployments and reduce code duplication.

The Terraform workflow initializes your project, generates execution plans showing proposed changes, reviews the plan for safety, applies approved changes to provision resources, and destroys infrastructure when needed. This plan-review-apply cycle ensures infrastructure matches your code before deployment.

Terraform provisioning covers both AWS cloud resources (EC2, EKS, networking) and Kubernetes clusters through provider plugins. Define AWS infrastructure and EKS clusters together, manage both with consistent tagging and remote state, and coordinate multi-cloud deployments from a single codebase.

Environment-specific variables in Terraform separate configuration from code using .tfvars files, workspace variables, and input variable definitions. Define dev, staging, and production configs separately, apply consistent tagging across environments, and use remote state with workspaces to manage parallel deployments safely.