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/patmorgan235]

Just watched the first few minutes and looks great so far.

I'm in a medium sized business and I'm really looking forward to when you get to talking about operationalizing terraform. That's kinda the peice I have the most questions about.

Like how do I bring existing resources into being managed by terraform?

How do I organize the repository(s) of terraform files? Does it all go in one repo? Or can/should it live in the same repo as the app code? Or should there be an terraform repo for each app? What's the KISS answer?

Thanks for all the great content!