Terraform: Up and Running: Writing Infrastructure as Code 1st Edition

I hope the 'Verified Purchase' flag shows that I purchased this book. Not only did I buy this wonderful book, but I actually read it before writing this review. This is a great book. Yevgeniy starts with anecdotes that describe the stark differences between how purchasing / deploying/ testing/ maintaining 'physical infrastructure' differs from today's cloud infrastructure. The book's first section answers the questions 'why should I read this' as well as 'is this author's experience purely theoretical or did he earn his scars on the front line'. The author is very experienced with DevOps and is well-respected within the tight knit DevOps community. I found particular value in his discussion of how Gruntwork (a DevOps-as-a-Service startup he co-founded) went about selecting an 'infrastructure as code' deployment tool. He compared and contrasted: Chef, Puppet, Ansible, CloudFormation, SaltStack, and of course Terraform. The author helped me understand some terms I'd never heard before: like idempotent. He defined other words (I'd heard before just not) in the context of comparing 'infrastructure as code' tools: like immutable declarative vs. mutable procedural. If this is beginning to sound dry - quite the opposite is true - it was fascinating and informative. I was struck by how evenhandedly he treated all the vendors/tools. Ansible & Chef are wonderful tools. He was upfront with the drawbacks of the Terraform platform and its young community. However, his reasoning for choosing Terraform was incredibly persuasive: 1. due in no small part to his experience and 2. why would anyone want to be responsible for telling their infrastructure-as-code tool 'how' to achieve some desired end state versus defining that desired end state and allow the tool to determine the most efficient way to achieve it. The remainder of the book teaches best practices (including setting-up git repositories) and the syntax for accomplishing 99% of what Terraform can do today. I created a CentOS 7 VM on my Mac where I first installed the AWSCLI and then Terraform. For those that don't have that option or would rather take a shortcut - I suggest launching an EC2 instance using Amazo's Linux AMI (AWSCLI is ready to use) (plus you can assign a security role granting AWSCLI permission to perform the Terraform activities - preventing you from having to hardcode your AWS credentials). I followed right along with every exercise/lab Yevgeniy performed. I was impressed with how intuitive most my personal syntax errors were to correct. Now let me speak a little about Terraform. Wow! There's a fascinating YouTube video 'Applying Graph Theory to Infrastructure as Code' that explains that the Terraform's underpinnings are based in 'Graph Theory' mathematics. I firmly believe that Hashicorp's success is a mixture of visionary leaders and this applied math foundation ( a perfect analog for creating, modifying today's cloud infrastructure ). One final anecdote: Amazon Partner Network (APN) Consulting partners - companies that have invested in the people & tools & training to earn AWS' seal of approval - almost exclusively use Terraform.

I really like the material. As advertised, this will get you up and running with Terraform if you have a decent understanding of AWS. This won't make you a guru, but you'll come out the other side with a good understanding of how to structure your Terraform projects (woefully missing in the official docs), what Terraform can and cannot do, and some neat little QOL tricks that I hadn't seen in the official docs.If you plan on purchasing the Kindle version, you're probably not going to enjoy how garbled the code formatting is in the web reader.Some material is already out of date - namely the section on remote state and state locking. A quick google will point you in the right direction; the "new" way of handling these things is much cleaner and easier anyway.

I've been studying Terraform off and on for about a month now. I devoured the Terraform documentation and countless blog posts for how to do things beyond the trivial "hello world" type examples. Last night I discovered the blog post series that inspired this book, and I realized how valuable the information was for me. I decided to buy the ebook as a sign of gratitude for how various concepts were so clearly explained using well-written examples.This book definitely shares a lot (if not all) of the content included in the blog posts, but it does go into more detail. It's clear that the book has been reviewed by skilled and knowledgeable individuals. All of the information in the book made sense to me. In several places, alternative approaches to one thing or another are discussed. The recommendations for best practices were exactly what I was looking for when I purchased this book. I do not regret a thing.The book is short. I'm a slow reader, and I finished it within a few hours while following along with many of the examples. Upon reaching the appendix, I immediately came here to write this review. I'm excited to dig into Terraform some more and apply the concepts I learned from this book.One downside to this book (and the industry as a whole) is that it was only published a week or so ago, and it's already outdated. Terraform 0.9 was released a week before this book was finally published. This new version includes improvements around remote state management and environment-based state. Unfortunately, the book has no way to cover this brand new information, and the suggested tool for helping with remote state management is not compatible with Terraform 0.9 (yet). I would love to see an update to this book that includes advice for leveraging the new remote state management and environment-based state functionality.

I bought this book because I really enjoyed this author's first book (Hello, Startup) and thought I would give this book a read as well.Terraform is a infrastructure as code tool for provisioning cloud servers. It is a declarative language where you state what resources you want, how you want them configured, and the tool figures out how to create it.An excellent job was done introducing Terraform and explaining the competing tools. There are comparisons to Chef, Ansible, CloudFormation, and a few others. This helped give a broad overview of the field and how Terraform compares.Examples in the book connect to AWS resources and it is explained how the tool can also connect to Azure and Google Cloud. Best practices are mentioned often throughout the book. Terraform is a young project and is still evolving. There are relevant links scattered throughout the book for where to find more information.This is a concise book in that it is roughly 160 pages, and I think it worked well for this subject. This author has a gift for writing about complex technical subjects in a logical and interesting way.