In this chapter, you learned a lot of new technologies that can be combined with Terraform to perfect your Infrastructure as Code setup. We practiced every type of provisioner Terraform has, specifically, the following:
- Executed tests with Inspec and Terraform outputs
- Generated inventory files for Ansible with
local-exec - Created new Chef nodes with the Chef provisioner
- Installed the Puppet agent with
remote-execand uploaded Puppet manifests with a file provisioner - Made reusable provisioning with
null_resource
We also took a look at a few third-party plugins, which are, unfortunately, of low quality, often unsupported, and having bugs. You should normally use both built-in providers and provisioners, or implement something with existing provisioners.
In the next chapter, we will go to the next level of managing infrastructure with Terraform. You will actually learn how to continuously manage an existing infrastructure. We will see what Terraform provides in terms of scaling infrastructure and how to perform complex update scenarios.