IaC is the process of deploying and managing cloud infrastructures and application lifecycle through writing and executing code, rather than using manual configurations or GUIs (e.g. Azure Portal, AWS Console, etc.).

IaC offers many benefits. Just some of them are:

• Provisioning the infrastructure resources in a automation way, which's much faster and consistent than manual.
• Manage multiple environements (dev, qa, prod, etc.)
• Repeatable usage of the IaC.
• Versioning of IaC codes with version control (e.g. Git) and you can access always the old versions or update them.
• IaC code can be used as a doc and anyone can access and understand it at any time.

... and much more

Terraform is an open source IaC tool maintained by HashiCorp for deploying cloud infrastructures and managing whole cloud-native application lifecyles through writing and executing codes in a declarative way, rather than manually. Terraform allows you to write human-readable configuration codes with Hashicorp Configuration Lanaguage (HCL) to define your cloud infrastructures. This code can be used to deploy repeatable and consistent environments across public, private, hybrid, and community cloud providers.

• configuration files: Define your resources
• terraform init: Initialize configuration files inside current directory and download the provider plugins from Terraform Registry
• terraform plan: Create an execution plan
• terraform apply: Apply the planned execution
• terrafrom.tfstate: Terraform will store the current state of deployed resources

Install using package manager using following commands

brew tap hashicorp/tap

brew install hashicorp/tap/terraform

Or install the binary file from the Terraform website.

Download Terraform from the Terraform website and unzip it. The ZIP will extract a single binary file terraform. Move this file somewhere on your disk where you want Terraform to be installed (e.g. C:/ ). Then add the path of this file on your System environment.

Download Terraform from the Terraform home page and unzip it. Open the Terminal in the folder which Terraform is downloaded, then move the extracted binary file terraform file to the /etc/local/bin/ using following command:

sudo mv terraform /usr/local/bin/

Check your installation using following commmand (the same in all OS):

terraform --version

Download and install Azure CLI and than prove your installation:

az version

Log in to your Azure account:

az login

List the available subscriptions in your directory:

az account list -o table

Choose the right subscription:

az account set --subscription "<your-subscription-id>"

Navigate into one of the sub-directories in the root directory (e.g. cd 01_getting-started) and deploy the defined resources in the main.tf using following commands:

Initialize your working directory and install provider plugins:

terraform init

Create an execution plan:

terraform plan

Apply the pre-determined execution plan:

terraform apply

Destroy all resources:

terraform destroy

Terraform Developer Docs