From the Preface

Who Should Read This Book

Someone is responsible for the code after it has been written. Sys admins, operations engineers, release engineers, site reliability engineers, DevOps engineers, infrastructure developers, full-stack developers, engineering managers, and CTOs are included. If you are the one managing infrastructure, deploy code, configuring server, scaling clusters, backing up data, monitoring apps, and responding to alerts at 3 a.m., this book is for you.

All of the tasks are usually referred to as operations. It was common to find developers who knew how to write code, but didn’t understand operations, and sys admins who didn’t know how to write code.

You could get away with that divide in the past, but in the modern world, as cloud computing and the DevOps movement become ubiquitous, just about every developer will need to learn operational skills and every sys admin will need to learn coding skills.

A basic familiarity with programming, the command line, and server-based software should suffice. By the end of the book, you will have a solid grasp of one of the most critical aspects of modern development and operations: managing infrastructure as code.

You will learn how to manage infrastructure as code using Terraform, as well as how this fits into the overall DevOps world. You will be able to answer some of the questions by the end of the book.

• Why don’t you use IaC?
• What are the differences between configuration management and server templating?
• When should you use Terraform, Chef, Ansible, Puppet, Salt, CloudFormation, Docker, Packer, or Kubernetes?

• How do you use Terraform to manage your infrastructure?
• How do you make new Terraform modules?
• Terraform code is reliable enough for production usage, how do you write it?
• How do you test your code?
• How do you make Terraform part of the deployment process?
• How can Terraform be used as a team?

A computer, internet connection, and desire to learn are all you need.