Today’s project will utilize two major cloud computing tools.

Terraform is an infrastructure orchestration tool (also known as “infrastructure as code(IaC)”). Using Terraform, you declare every single piece of your infrastructure once, in static files, allowing you to deploy and destroy cloud infrastructure easily, make incremental changes to the infrastructure, do rollbacks, infrastructure versioning, etc.

Amazon created an innovative solution for deploying and managing a fleet of virtual machines — AWS ECS. Under the hood, ECS utilizes AWSs’ well-known concept of EC2 virtual machines, as well as CloudWatch for monitoring them, auto scaling groups (for provisioning and deprovisioning machines depending on the current load of the cluster), and most importantly — Docker as a containerization engine.

Here’s what’s to be done:

Within a VPC there’s an autoscaling group with EC2 instances. ECS manages starting tasks on those EC2 instances based on Docker images stored in ECR container registry. Each EC2 instance is a host for a worker that writes something to RDS MySQL. EC2 and MySQL instances are in different security groups.

We need to provision a some building blocks:

• a VPC with a public subnet as an isolated pool for our resources
• Internet Gateway to contact the outside world
• Security groups for RDS MySQL and for EC2s
• Auto-scaling group for ECS cluster with launch configuration
• RDS MySQL instance
• ECR container registry
• ECS cluster with task and service definition

The Terraform Part

To start with Terraform we need to install it. Just go along with the steps in this document: https://www.terraform.io/downloads.html

Verify the installation by typing:

$ terraform --version
Terraform v0.13.4

With Terraform (version 0.13.4) we can provision cloud architecture by writing code which is usually created in a programming language. In this case it’s going to be HCL — a HashiCorp configuration language.

#infrastructure-as-code #aws-ec2 #aws #terraform #devops