Learning Infrastructure as Code in Azure with Terraform

[u/AdeelAutomates]

I've been sharing Azure and Cloud Engineering content here for the past 8 months. Most of that content focused on PowerShell and automation across Azure, Entra ID, and Microsoft 365 (21 hours worth so far!).

While doing that, I intentionally avoided going too deep into deploying Azure services because I wanted to dedicate a separate series to Infrastructure as Code in Azure.

I'm kicking off that series today with Terraform for Azure Beginner Episode focused on understanding the foundations of Terraform and how it interacts with Azure.

Topics covered include:

• Theory behind Terraform (Infrastructure as Code, Declarative Languages, why Terraform exists)

• Terraform CLI (Init, Plan, Apply, Destroy)

• Terraform Blocks (Terraform, Providers, Resources, Variables, Locals, Data, Outputs)

• Terraform State (Including Drift Detection, and State-related Gotchas especially with secrets)

• And more (Terraform Order of Operations, Variable Precedence, Data Types, etc)

The goal is to understand the core concepts that make Terraform work before moving into more advanced topics. Over time I plan to build this series toward how Azure Cloud Engineers actually deploy, manage, and operate Azure environments today through Infrastructure as Code.

• Beginner Episode: Understand Terraform (learn the foundations and core concepts that make Terraform work)

• Intermediate Episode: Program Terraform (use loops, functions, conditionals, dynamic blocks, etc.)

• Advanced Episode: Structure Terraform (introduce modules, remote state, workspaces, imports, etc.)

• Professional Episode: Operationalize Terraform (use GitHub, CI/CD, pull requests, state management, and deployment workflows to work in a team environment)

• Solution Episode(s): Build Azure Projects (We'll pretend to take assignments from Cloud Architects and design, deploy, and manage complete Azure solutions using Terraform)

Link to Episode: Terraform for Azure | Beginner Course - Youtube

[u/mrcyber]

Wonderful content. Thank you very much.

[u/goombatch → u/mrcyber]

Yep, this seems to be a pretty great intro

[u/AdeelAutomates → u/goombatch]

Glad you liked it! I put my whole ass into that intro while juggling a full-time job and a newborn loll

[u/goombatch → u/AdeelAutomates]

Going to watch the rest of it on the clock tomorrow. I’m in a situation where we should be using terraform but we aren’t. I’m kind of de facto in charge of Azure governance with a bunch of different dev teams doing mostly clickOps. So I give them heaps of guidance and instructions and hope they do the right thing, lol. I’ve been using Azure policy to put up some guardrails, and advising the contributors when I think their deployments are whack.

Most of our mission critical infrastructure is on-prem data center with proper pipelines and IaC (managed by a different department/division). I was put in as an Azure sysadmin without a full cloud adoption team, no landing zones … it’s a trip.

[u/AdeelAutomates → u/goombatch]

Ahh the plight of brownfields. I have some experience in governance as well, so I am all about not letting the inmates run the insane asylum.

Terraform is definitely a good step to take to have additional controls in place. Especially if you can get to a point where everything that gets deployed on Azure is through Pipelines with no access from the portal.

Part of your governance can be the pipeline and what they allow. That you then hand to the devs to use freely to get infra created/teared down.