Chapter 13. TCI - Build & Release

Question 1

Name a few tools for build and release

Answer 1

• Terraform
• CloudFormation
• BOSH (open source)

Question 2

What is Terraform?

Answer 2

• tool for defining Infrastructure as code
• agnostic to the underlying platforms

Question 3

What are providers in the context of Terraform? What are they responsible for?

Answer 3

• companys that expose physical machines ,vms, network switches or containers which are treated as resources
• responsible for understanding API interactions and exposing resources
• makes Terraform agnostic to the underlying platforms
• custom providers can be configured through plugins

Question 4

What are key features of Terraform?

Answer 4

• Infrastructure as Code
• Execution plans
• Resource Graph
• Change Automation

Question 5

Describe the Terraform Feature “Infrastructure as Code”

Answer 5

• infrastructure can be described using a high-level configuration syntax
• allows the blueprint of your datacenter to be versioned and treated like any other code
• additionally the infrastructure can be re-used and shared

Question 6

Describe the Terraform feature “Execution Plans”

Answer 6

• in Terraform exists a ‘planning’ step, where an execution plan is generated
• shows what Terraform will do when apply is called
• avoids surprises when using Terraform to manipulate infrastructure

Question 7

Describe the Terraform feature “Resource Graph”

Answer 7

• Terraform builds a graph of all your resources
• parallelizes the creation and modification of any non-dependent resources
• thus builds the infrastructure as efficient as possible, operators get insigh into dependencies in their infrastructure

Question 8

Describe the Terraform feature “Change Automation”

Answer 8

• complex changesets can be applied to infrastructure with minimal human interaction
• because of Resource Graph and Execution plan you can exactly what Terraform will change and in what order, avoiding possible human error