Terraform is a great tool to manage the cloud resources.

When I first started managing the AWS infrastructure, I started with the “click” ops. It means, I am clicking on VPC, EC2, RDS on the AWS web console.

It is not the most efficient way to manage the cloud resources if I need to duplicate it in different regions. The worst of all, “click ops” is error prone.

AWS offers CloudFormation, though it solved my problem, but I did not enjoy writing the cloud infrastructure with CloudFormation at all.

I attend the AWS reInvent conference, I stumbled into the AWS CDK talk. I told myself, this is it. A language I am familiar with (as a software engineer working closely with PHP and JavaScript) and the experience writing infrastructure as code was a big improvement. It solved my problem, but it felt writing CDK is like writing an app to provision cloud resources.

Then, on the next AWS reInvent conference, I stumbled into Terraform. I think it was 2019 and Mitchell was in the panel and I do not know anything about it except the content is infrastructure as code something. Anyway, after the talk, I say to myself, this is it! I am familiar with Packer, an excellent tool when I used it for Laravel Homestead, and later on preparing AWS images. The HCL syntax was easy to read and to learn. It was such an elegant solution. terraform validate, terraform apply, terraform plan. These are just some of the valuable tools available for building cloud infrastructure.

I am quite happy with Terraform for delivering such enjoyable developer experience.