Infrastructure as Code: What Does Terraform Offer?

Terraform creates a central command center for managing your entire IT infrastructure. How does it work, and what benefits does Infrastructure as Code offer your organization? Here is an overview.

Centralized and Digital Control of Your IT Infrastructure with Terraform

Software, platforms, infrastructure -- IT environments in modern enterprises are growing steadily. With that growth come increasing challenges in effectively managing a diverse infrastructure.

Terraform is an infrastructure-as-code tool that lets you create a single control point for managing your IT infrastructure. It provides an abstraction layer that unifies all resources and describes them in a common configuration language called HashiCorp Configuration Language. This language uses blocks, arguments, and expressions to represent infrastructure as code.

Benefits of Infrastructure as Code

An organization's IT infrastructure consists of software, hardware, platforms, and servers. Each of these resources comes from different vendors and must be configured and managed separately. At the same time, every service needs to work seamlessly with the rest of the stack, without introducing security gaps that attackers could exploit. As a result, infrastructure management quickly becomes costly and makes it difficult to respond to new challenges in a timely and flexible manner.

With Infrastructure as Code, you gain a centralized view of all resources and infrastructure -- described in a standardized language that every team member can understand. You collect your entire infrastructure in the Terraform Workspace, where you store variables, state files, credentials, and secrets. Instead of managing each resource separately, you simply edit text files in Terraform. These files contain the configuration that is applied through each provider's API.

Before any configuration changes take effect, Terraform Plan gives you a preview of all planned modifications -- including the associated costs.

On top of that, Terraform makes resources reusable once they have been defined. After building and mapping an infrastructure in Terraform, you can spin up entire cloud environments and duplicate them at will. This shortens release cycles and lets you respond more quickly to changing requirements. To boost a server's performance, you no longer need to manually provision new hardware -- your infrastructure scales automatically.

Terraform is now supported by all major cloud providers, so integrating existing resources through ready-made interfaces is straightforward. Besides Terraform, there are several alternative solutions you can explore in this overview.

Performing Static Code Analysis in Terraform with TFLint

Terraform translates your IT infrastructure into code. As with any code-driven approach, misconfigurations can occur and become a security risk. Most modern programming language compilers include built-in static code analysis tools, but Terraform's own validator can only catch errors in its native syntax.

For example, if you reference a non-existent provider instance in your code, running Terraform Apply will produce an error. However, the built-in Terraform Validate tool will not catch this issue because it has no knowledge of provider-specific constraints.

TFLint (find the GitHub repository here) solves this problem by detecting such errors upfront, making them much easier to fix. Once installed, TFLint can be integrated into your development workflow to implement automated analysis routines that improve the security of your infrastructure.

Infrastructure as Code: Managing Infrastructure Effectively and Securely

Infrastructure as Code helps organizations manage and control an increasingly complex infrastructure from a single point. Auditing becomes straightforward at any time, since there is no need to manually analyze each resource -- all information is represented in one language, as code. TFLint complements Terraform with essential code analysis capabilities, allowing you to quickly detect and fix vendor-specific syntax errors and security gaps. Together, Terraform and TFLint form a powerful toolkit for tackling the management challenges that come with growing IT complexity.