LI420: Terraform / OpenTofu Administration

Agenda:

• Fundamentals & Getting Started with Infrastructure as Code

  • What is Terraform?

  • OpenTofu (important addition!)

  • Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

    • Declarative approach

    • Versioning

    • Reproducibility

    • Automation

    • Idempotency

  • Traceability

  • CI/CD integration - scalability

  • Self-service infrastructure
    
    

• Terraform Architecture & Core Concepts

  • Provider concept

  • Interface to APIs

  • Responsible for:

    • Authentication

    • Resource management

  • State reconciliation

  • Areas of use

  • Public cloud

  • Private cloud

  • Hybrid cloud

  • On-prem

  • Kubernetes

  • SaaS resources

  • No alternatives?

    • Pulumi

    • AWS™ CloudFormation

    • Azure Resource Manager

    • OpenStack Heat
      
      

• Terraform & Vagrant

  • Difference between provisioning vs. infrastructure

  • Vagrant

  • Local development environments
    
    

• Terraform Enterprise & Cloud

  • Terraform Enterprise

  • Terraform Cloud

  • Remote state

  • RBAC

  • Policy as Code (Sentinel)

  • Team workflows
    
    

• Practical Work with Terraform

  • Installation

  • Binary download

  • Package manager

  • Docker

  • Kubernetes

  • Important CLI commands

    • init

    • plan

    • apply

    • destroy

    • validate

    • fmt

    • show

    • state

    • workspace
      
      

• Project Structure & Settings

  • Create a workspace

  • Separation of environments (dev/stage/prod)

  • Terraform settings block
    
    

• Providers in Detail

  • Provider functions

  • API mapping

  • Resource lifecycle

  • Data sources
    
    

• Creating Resources

  • Compute resource

  • Multiple resources (count / for_each)

  • Modifying resources

  • Network resource

  • Floating IP

  • Block devices

  • Null resources

  • Variables & outputs

  • Datatypes

    • string

    • number

    • bool

    • list

    • map

    • object

  • Declare variables

  • tfvars

  • Define outputs

  • Migration to variables

  • Data sources (querying existing resources)
    
    

• State, Modules, Teamwork & Best Practices

  • Terraform state

    • Single source of truth

    • Sensitive data

    • Drift detection

  • State backends

  • Local

  • S3

  • Azure Blob

  • GCS
    
    

• Modules

  • Module structure

    • main.tf

    • variables.tf

    • outputs.tf

  • Module best practices

    • Reusability

    • Versioning

    • Private module registry

    • OpenTofu registry usage
      
      

• Working in a Team

  • Git, SVN & co.

  • Pull requests

  • Branching strategies

  • Code reviews

  • Remote state locking

  • Wrapper scripts

  • Admin workstation concept

  • CI/CD pipelines
    
    

• Alternative Technologies

  • Ansible

  • Chef

  • Puppet

  • Pulumi

  • AWS™ CloudFormation

  • Google™ Cloud Deployment Manager

  • OpenStack Heat

Objectives:

Target audience:

• DevOps Engineers,
• cloud and system administrators
• IT architects who want to automate their infrastructure efficiently.

Prerequisites:

• Basic knowledge of cloud technologies and Linux systems.

Description:

In the hands-on course LI420 Terraform / OpenTofu Administration you will learn the fundamentals and advanced concepts of Terraform as well as its open source fork OpenTofu.

The course teaches how to efficiently plan, create, manage and automate Infrastructure as Code (IaC) - both in cloud and on-premises environments. You will gain a solid understanding of Terraform architecture, provider structures, state management as well as the use of modules, workspaces and CI/CD workflows. Additionally, we compare Terraform with alternative technologies such as Pulumi, Ansible, Chef, Puppet, CloudFormation and other tools.

Through practical exercises you will create your own resources, work with multiple providers and learn to manage infrastructure in a team-safe and reproducible manner. Special focus is on best practices for modular structures, reusability and the use of OpenTofu as an open source alternative to Terraform.