A long while ago I wrote about how to configure centralised State Locking for Terraform using Dynamo DB. This configuration has become battle tested and fairly low cost solution for anyone using Terraform in AWS and scales well with pretty advanced configurations but it isn’t without it’s drawbacks. DynamoDB can be a bit confusing to navigate if you’re unfamiliar with it and releasing state locks can be a similarly scary . . .
If you’re using Terraform in AWS you’ll very quickly find yourself needing to work with AWS Subnets. This can be a surprisingly fussy and in a lot of Terraform configs you tend to see the same solution being employed; inputting a list of Subnet IDs and CIDRs as a variables. Whilst there isn’t exactly anything wrong with this and it does work, it can be a bit clunky, messy and . . .
Previously we looked at using Localstack to emulate AWS services and speed up the feedback loop during development. In this short post we’re going to look at how to integrate this tool with Terraform to perform some simple testing that can emulate our builds for free and give us some confidence in our code before running it. This post will assume that you have Localstack installed and running. If not, . . .
A short while ago I wrote about setting up Continuous Deployment for Terraform using Bitbucket. Whilst that post is perfectly accurate from a technical standpoint it leads us in to a real minefield and really I don’t think it’s a very good idea to use Terraform in Continuous Deployment at all, rather a system of Continuous Delivery is more effective utilising manual deployments. This post is going to look at . . .
This article was going to be a look at how to configure IAM roles to work with EKS Service Accounts, however that topic is already well documented in the AWS docs right here. Whilst there’s nothing wrong with it in a technical sense, I can’t help find it a little clunky, using the AWS CLI and eksctl to get the job done. I’ve been pretty unattracted to eksctl (though it . . .
Recently I’ve been having some fun with writing a fairly complex Terraform module which of course has to make use of Conditional Logic a fair bit. The Terraform documentation covers both Conditionals, Functions and Operators very well, but practical examples are a little lacking. In this short post I’m going to look at how Conditionals work and a few helpful examples of using a few Operators and Functions to extend . . .
Last year I wrote about automating Elastic Kubernetes Service role configuration (direct modification of the aws-auth ConfigMap) using Terraform, and a somewhat clunky method of injecting ARN data by looking it up from a secret management service (in this case Hashicorp Vault). Whilst the solution works well it comes with a serious built in issue when we want to provision a new deployment from scratch, namely the need to import . . .
EDIT: A few days after publishing this article, Hashicorp’s official AWS provider was updated to support default tags directly from the provider (which is very simple and saves all of the work detailed in this article). This only works with AWS so if you’re working in another cloud keep reading on, if you’re only working in AWS take a look at the Hashicorp blog post here which provides some very . . .
Recently I’ve been looking AWS’ Elastic File Service platform, which allows for the provisioning of highly available PaaS storage which can accessed via NFS by multiple services at at very low cost. Whilst this is good, what’s even better is templating and automating the provisioning. In this post we’ll look at how to provision HA EFS storage using Terraform. What Do We Want? We have the option to create EFS . . .
Terraform is a powerful Infrastructure as Code tool ideal for creating cloud environments and its flexible HCL syntax allows for the provisioning of complex environments from simple templates, saving countless hours. Often missed is the ability to template resources and use them in conjunction with Terraform’s workspaces feature to maintain concurrent versions of the same environment. When coupled with even a basic Continuous Deployment pipeline this combination of systems allows . . .