Introduction to Terraform on Azure

Course details

In this course Prince Mokut—a certified Cloud and DevOps engineer—teaches intermediate cloud and DevOps professionals how to harness the power of Terraform to manage and automate Azure infrastructure. Learn how to configure Terraform, set up Azure credentials, and write effective configurations using HCL. Explore best practices for variables and state management with Azure Blob Storage. Dive into advanced topics, such as creating reusable modules, managing multiple environments with workspaces, and integrating CI/CD pipelines using Azure DevOps. Plus, gain practical experience deploying key Azure resources and establishing temporary QA environments for rapid testing. By the end of the course, you will be equipped with the skills to build, secure and tear down production-ready infrastructure on Azure using Terraform.

Learning objectives
Install and configure the Terraform CLI, set up Azure Credentials.
Understand the role of Terraform providers to establish a solid foundation in Infrastructure as Code.
Write and customize Terraform configurations, manage variables and tfvar files and execute essential Terraform commands to provision and manage Azure resources.
Automate infrastructure deployments using CI/CD pipelines, enabling seamless orchestration of resource provisioning and supporting ephemeral QA environments.
Apply best practices in organizing Terraform code, managing sensitive data with environment variables, and debugging Terraform configuration issues.

Concepts

0. Introduction

01 - From clicks to code - Terraform for Azure
02 - What you should know
03 - Exercise files on GitHub

1. Introduction to Terraform

04 - What is Terraform
05 - Benefits of using Terraform
06 - Terraform vs. other IaC tools
07 - Installing the Terraform CLI
08 - Configuring Azure credentials for Terraform
09 - Overview of Terraform providers

2. Terraform Fundamentals

10 - Writing your first Terraform configuration
11 - Understanding Terraform's HCL syntax
12 - Key Terraform commands - Init, plan, apply, and destroy
13 - Declaring variables and using tfvar files
14 - Best practices for managing configuration with variables

3. State Management and Workspaces

15 - What are workspaces
16 - Using Terraform workspaces
17 - Define and provision Azure VM with workspaces
18 - Understanding Terraform state (local vs. remote)
19 - Configuring remote state using Azure Blob Storage
20 - Implementing state locking and versioning

4. Terraform Modules

21 - Why use modules
22 - Defining variable for compute module
23 - Defining compute infrastructure
24 - Reference and deploy compute module
25 - Defining Azure SQL database module
26 - Defining an Azure Web App module
27 - Deploying our modules
28 - Destroying our provisioned resources

5. Terraform Deployments with Azure DevOps Pipelines

29 - Introduction to CI CD for Terraform
30 - Configure and clone your DevOps project
31 - Configure service principal and variable groups
32 - Define CI workflow for Terraform
33 - Define environments and dev CD workflow
34 - Automating deployments in Azure - Staging and production
35 - Approval gate for production workflow
36 - Destroy resources with CI CD

Conclusion

37 - Put your Terraform skills to work