terraform-vote-provider

Terraform Plugins

Terraform is comprised of Terraform Core and Terraform Plugins.

Task: Extending Terraform

1. How Terraform Works

   Terraform is a tool for building, changing, and versioning infrastructure safely and efficiently.

   • Terraform Core

     The primary responsibilities of Terraform Core are:

     • Infrastructure as code: reading and interpolating configuration files and modules
     • Resource state management
     • Construction of the Resource Graph
     • Plan execution
     • Communication with plugins over RPC

   • Terraform Plugins

     • Provider, such as AWS
     • Provisioner, such as bash

     The primary responsibilities of Provider Plugins are:

     • Initialization of any included libraries used to make API calls.
     • Authentication with the infrastructure Provider
     • Define Resources that map to specific Services

     The primary responsibilites of Provisioner Plugins are:

     • Executing commands or scripts on the designated Resource after creation, or on destruction.

2. Terraform Plugin Types

• Providers

  Providers define Resources and are responsible for managing their life cycles.

  Each Resource implements CREATE, READ, UPDATE, and DELETE (CRUD) methods to manage itself, while Terraform Core manages a Resouces Graph of all the resources declared in the configuration as well as their current state.

  Providers can be fetched from:

  • releases.hashicorp.com

  • Provider Installation

    1. Explicit Installation Method Configuration
    2. Implied Local Mirror Directories

Develop Customized/In-house Providers

Terraform support developers to explore their customized or in-house providers on their local machine, referring to office doc: In-house Provider and Implied Local Mirror Directories

For simlicity, run make install in the project root path.

More details can be found in the install target of Makefile