How to build a Multi-Cloud and Hybrid-Cloud Infrastructure using Terraform?

How to build a Multi-Cloud and Hybrid-Cloud Infrastructure using Terraform?  zekeLabs
Posted on Aug. 2, 2020, 12:30 p.m.

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What is Terraform?

In the era of cloud-wars, the CIOs often have a hard time adopting a single cloud. Putting all their infrastructure into one cloud is a risky proposition. So the best approach is to use the multi-cloud or hybrid cloud strategy. Having multiple cloud providers makes it easy for organizations to not be dependent on only one cloud service provider. But handling multiple clouds can be very daunting as many automation provided by one cloud service provider may not work with the other clouds. 

With the help of Terraform, you can write a single set of scripts to manage multi-cloud and hybrid cloud systems. You can also handle cross-cloud functions. Multi-cloud infrastructure will help in reducing the cost and making your systems more fault-tolerant and efficient. It will also help large-scale companies use different clouds for different projects/clients. 

 

Challenges in building a Multi-Cloud infrastructure

The world of Private data centers is a lot different from Public Cloud systems. The real-world data centers store data and information which are relatively homogeneous in their infrastructure. In a multi-cloud system, cloud services are more heterogeneous, the inter-operability of cloud-services is almost non-existent and integration is quite challenging.

While building a Multi-cloud Infrastructure, developers usually face the following 3 challenges:

  1. Hardship in migration from one cloud to another cloud services
  2. Lack of portability of the applications
  3. Different skill-sets needed for different clouds. 
  4. Lack of integration scope of cloud-services coming from different cloud service providers.

Terraform provides a single pane of glass to manage multi-cloud, hybrid-cloud as well as helps us integrate other API-based modern tools and platforms. 

 

The Advantages of using HCL

Terraform uses the Hashicorp language (HCL) that is JSON compliant. It helps professionals convert infrastructure into code and manage it the same way that the application code is developed, tested, and deployed. The developers can build cloud or other infrastructure that they want, by using HCL. The advantages of using HCL are:

  1. It is easy to learn which makes it simple for the developers to get started
  2. It is understandable for both humans and machines.
  3. You can define multiple types of Infrastructure such as big providers like AWS, Azure, and many others like the Kubernetes or even custom-inhouse API-based platforms.
  4. The variables that HCL uses makes it easier for maintaining changes.

 

Tips for using Terraform 

Listed below are some necessary guidelines to be followed while using Terraform for configuring the productivity and efficiency of your team:

  1. You need to use a modern User Interface for having well-organized management of data and information.
  2. Use strong backends to store and manage the resource states.
  3. Re-organize the processes and teams to make them more collaborative.
  4. Find an efficient Version Control system for the infrastructure as code. You need to have a central registry for publishing and discovering codes for the infrastructure.
  5. Educate your developers to write modular and reusable code.
  6. Minimize hardcoding, better coding guidelines for the infrastructure as well.
  7. Strong review and release process.
  8. Proper dev-environment and sandboxes to make mistakes and learn. 
  9. Integrate a strong secret management system.
  10. Get your team trained on the best practices of using Terraform.
  11. Try the enterprise version of Terraform to manage the complexities.

 

If you want to grab this opportunity to learn more about Terraform and cloud automation and enhance your skills in this upcoming field, make sure to check out our training in Terraform.

zekeLabs - an L&D Guardian and a pioneer of the Proactive Revolution, is the most zealous organization with in-house subject matter experts (SMEs) & technology evangelists in India and Southeast Asia.



Keywords : terraform cloud Technology

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