What you will learn
- Define IaC and its benefits
- Compare declarative and imperative
- Understand drift
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The basics, in plain English
Instead of clicking around a cloud console to create servers by hand, you can write a file describing the infrastructure you want, and a tool builds it for you. That idea is Infrastructure as Code, and Terraform is the leading tool.
- Infrastructure
- The servers, networks, databases, and other cloud resources your app runs on.
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
- Describing that infrastructure in text files instead of clicking buttons.
- Terraform
- A popular tool that reads your files and creates the matching cloud resources.
- Declarative
- You describe the end result you want, and the tool figures out how to get there.
- Why IaC
- It makes infrastructure repeatable, reviewable, and easy to rebuild from scratch.
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Why IaC
Describing infrastructure in code makes it reviewable, repeatable, and recoverable. Declarative tools converge to a desired state rather than scripting steps.
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