Terraform is an open source tool to securely and efficiently preview, configure, and manage your cloud infrastructure and resources.
What is Terraform
HashiCorp Terraform is an IT infrastructure automation and orchestration tool. It lets you use code to manage and maintain IT resources. You can define infrastructure, such as virtual machines (VMs), storage accounts, and network interfaces, in configuration files that describe your cloud resource topology. The Terraform command-line interface (CLI) provides a simple mechanism to define, preview, and deploy cloud infrastructure on Alibaba Cloud using a simple template language. You can use Terraform to create, modify, and delete various resources, such as Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instances, Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs), ApsaraDB RDS instances, and Server Load Balancer (SLB) instances. For more information, see HashiCorp Terraform.
This topic describes how to use Terraform to create an ApsaraDB RDS for PostgreSQL instance.
Benefits
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Deploy infrastructure to multiple clouds
Terraform is suitable for multicloud scenarios where you deploy similar infrastructure across Alibaba Cloud, other cloud providers, and local data centers. It allows developers to use the same tools and similar configuration files to manage resources from different cloud providers.
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Automated infrastructure management
You can use Terraform to create configuration file templates to define and provision resources in a repeatable and predictable manner. This reduces human error during deployment and management. You can deploy the same template multiple times to create identical development, test, and production environments.
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Infrastructure as code (IaC)
You can manage and maintain resources using code. Terraform saves the state of your infrastructure. This lets you track changes to different components in your system and share these configurations with others.
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Reduce development costs
You can reduce costs by creating development and deployment environments on demand. You can also estimate costs before you make changes to your system.
Scenarios
For more information about Terraform application scenarios, see Terraform application scenarios.