Therefore, except for a few niche cases, I recommend the cloud native approach. This is also the approach that Terraform is designed for: you can use Terraform with multiple clouds, but you have to write separate code for each cloud, using the providers and resources native to that cloud. Therefore, even for multi-cloud deployments, it’s unusual to build a single Terraform module that deploys into multiple clouds (that is, uses multiple different providers in one module); it’s much more common to keep the code for each cloud in separate modules. The rapid evolution of the DevOps industry, though still in its infancy, poses an interesting question. The myriad of tools associated with Terraform has set a precedent, and one can only wonder where the trajectory will take us. Given the ever-evolving nature of technology, this book presents an effective foundation for those wanting to stay ahead of the curve. Terraform has emerged as a key player in the DevOps world for defining, launching, and managing infrastructure as code (IAC) across a variety of cloud and virtualization platforms, including AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure. This hands-on book is the fastest way to get up and running with Terraform. The negatives that I would identify would be that it is very front-heavy. Chapters 1-5 are pure gold. Chapter 6 is decent, and the last two chapters (7-8) are a mess. As others have pointed out, this book uses an older version of Terraform and several breaking changes have occurred. But I was still able to follow along. I assume the author will release a 3rd edition soon which should implement the new version 1 of Terraform which should be more stable going forward. I read the first edition of this book, so the terraform version is a little dated, making the exercises hard to follow at times. Also goes to show how fast terraform is evolving and not even yet hit the first leading major version, I.e., 0.* version only. The other challenge was also the intro of terragrunt, by the author, which made an entry and then disappeared later on, making it hard to follow the tutorial style text.

The author describes why and how should one use Terraform, the importance of the Infrastructure as Code in the first chapter. And step by step, chapter by chapter, the author gives the most of best practices of terraform, how to organize your infrastructure code and main problems you may encounter. The chapters explaining terraform are heavily on AWS, some may consider that a thumbsdown for the book, but as the author explained the reason for that, all those examples can be tested on a free tier AWS account, unless it is stated otherwise. You built a module and you want to use it several times—in a loop, essentially—without having to copy and paste the code. However, Terraform 0.12 and below didn’t support count or for_each on module. The solution Terraform has become a key player in the DevOps world for defining, launching, and managing infrastructure as code (IaC) across a variety of cloud and virtualization platforms, including AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, and more. This hands-on second edition, expanded and thoroughly updated for Terraform version 0.12 and beyond, shows you the fastest way to get up and running. through code examples that you can try at home. You'll go from deploying a basic "Hello, World" TerraformI also want to warn readers that the infrastructure in this book is not even close to production-quality. I think it is fine, since this is a book about Terraform and not Cloud Architecture, but it is worth noting. I wish the author had put a little more effort into delineating that. The examples in the book all use the AWS default VPC. Many features of load balancers, networking, and HA are omitted. I think it is ok, since the book is focused on Terraform itself and not the actual systems you are building. But it could give naive readers a false sense of empowerment to go out and deploy this system used in the book.

All the code is in the code folder. The code examples are organized first by the tool or language and then There are several ingredients to setting up a secure CI / CD pipeline for Terraform. The first ingredient is to handle credentials on your CI server securely. The 3rd edition of the book adds examples of using environment variables, IAM roles, and arguably the most secure option of all, OpenID Connect (OIDC). Chapter 6 includes an example of using OIDC with GitHub Actions to authenticate to AWS, via an IAM role, without having to manage any credentials at all: # Authenticate to AWS using OIDC

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As in other devops books that work with an infrastructure as code, server templating and other tools - it's very important to have your examples always up-to-date and runnable. Unfortunately you'll run into missing AWS AMIs that you can't just find. Only solution is to understand the point that is being presented and provide your own AMIs that fill the MVP requirements of the service that must be deployed.