Managing AWS infrastructure through Terraform

The purpose of this project is to provision and manage AWS infrastructure as code (IaC). The project is configured to use Terraform modules to create AWS Resources. The modular architecture allows resources to be encapsulated in it's module and changes to a module doesn't directly affect resources maintained in other modules. Also, when the number of resources or infrastructure complexity maintainability doesn't becomes an issue.

All the modules are registered with root module's main.tf. It provides a centralized configuration for choosing which resource should/ shouldn't be provisioned. The architecture diagram catalogs all the resources created by this project.

Benefits of the project:

1. Operational Excellence - The environment variables allows you to replicate the resources across different project environment such as pord, test, dev etc.
2. Security - Security best-practices are unified in templates/ JSON files which can be easily edited and reused multiple times.
3. Reliability - The resource states stored in an S3 bucket, so any unwanted manual changes to the resources can be easily identified and reverted back. Changes to the IaC can tagged in package.json through npn-version [patch|minor|major] and version controlled by Git.
4. Cost Optimization - Automates the AWS resource spin up, which eliminates the need of manual processes/ tasks altogether.

Prerequisites

Create a ~/.bash_profile to add environment variables.

AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID="access-key"
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY="secret-key"
AWS_DEFAULT_REGION="aws-region"

Go to the /terraform directory and source the bash profile

source ~/.bash_profile

Create an S3 Bucket named managed-infrastructure-tfstate to store the tfstate. you can create the bucket via the AWS Management Console or via the CLI.

aws s3 mb s3://managed-infrastructure-tfstate

Terraform Commands

Initialize terraform working directory.

terraform init

List the resources to be created via the script. Allows users to review, before applying the plan.

terrafomm plan

The command will also prompt you to provide:

• account_id
• environment
• rds_username
• rds_password

Apply the plan to create resources in AWS

terraform apply

Destroy all the infrastructure managed via the terraform.

terraform destroy