Infrastructure as Code with Terraform

Manual infrastructure provisioning doesn't scale. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) enables teams to manage cloud resources reliably, and Terraform has become the industry standard for this purpose.

Why Terraform?

Terraform offers:

• Declarative infrastructure definitions
• Version-controlled cloud environments
• Provider-agnostic design
• Predictable change management

Core Concepts

Providers

Define the cloud platform (AWS, Azure, GCP).

Resources

Represent infrastructure components like:

• EC2
• RDS
• Load balancers
• IAM roles

State Management

Terraform state tracks the real-world infrastructure. Best practices:

• Store state in S3
• Enable state locking with DynamoDB

Example: RDS with Terraform

resource "aws_db_instance" "postgres" {
  engine         = "postgres"
  instance_class = "db.t3.medium"
  allocated_storage = 50
  multi_az       = true
}