What is terraform and why it is the next thing you should learn

Are you a backend developer? DevOps practitioner? UI developer?

Irrespective of who you are, you might have come across scenarios where you might have realised having knowledge about cloud providers is one essential tool to be carrying around in your quiver.

It proves to be very useful when you are working on a side project or even when you just want to host your own domain for whatever reason.

With the rise of the cloud, no one really remains untouched with it. Every company, startup(big or small) have long moved away from setting up and managing their own infrastructure to using services provided by cloud providers.

Every day the big players AWS, GCP, Azure make to the news on how they have reduced the entire cost of infra setup and significantly increased security.

But with all these benefits come complexities and drawbacks.

Some of these are:

1. Repetitive tasks to configure resources across environments — dev, staging, UAT, production.
2. Manual setup — resources need to be created, modified, terminated manually one by one.
3. Prone to error — With the complexity of setting up 100s of VPCs, buckets, lambdas, EC2s, there is always a margin for error.

So how to deal with all this?

Every interesting problem has an even interesting solution and vice versa.

That interesting solution, in this case, is Terraform.

Terraform is a tool through which can tame any cloud provider. Having Terraform in your quiver can make your life significantly easy when it comes to managing and provisioning your cloud infrastructure.

How productive does Terraform make you?

Let us look at what you will be capable of once you learn Terraform:

1. You will be saving hours of manual labor through mins of automated work.
2. You will be able to tame any cloud provider for all your needs.
3. While understanding Terraform you will get a thorough understanding of the cloud providers as well.