Terraform Engineering – Core Practical Content

Weeks 9–18 (Production-ready, essential content & hands-on practice.)

Terraform is an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool by HashiCorp that enables automated provisioning and management of cloud and on-premises resources using declarative configuration files.

Key Responsibilities of a Terraform Engineer:

1. Infrastructure Provisioning – Define and deploy cloud resources (AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, etc.) using Terraform configurations (*.tf files).
2. State Management – Maintain and secure Terraform state (terraform.tfstate) using remote backends (S3, Terraform Cloud).
3. Modular & Reusable Code – Create reusable modules to standardize infrastructure deployments.
4. Dependency Management – Handle resource dependencies using Terraform’s DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph).
5. Collaboration & CI/CD Integration – Work with teams using version control (Git) and integrate Terraform into CI/CD pipelines.
6. Security & Compliance – Implement policy-as-code with tools like Sentinel or Open Policy Agent (OPA).
7. Drift Detection & Remediation – Use terraform plan to detect configuration drift and enforce consistency.
8. Multi-Cloud & Hybrid Deployments – Manage infrastructure across multiple providers using Terraform providers.

Core Terraform Commands:

• terraform init → Initialize a Terraform project.
• terraform plan → Preview changes before applying.
• terraform apply → Deploy infrastructure.
• terraform destroy → Remove managed resources.
• terraform state → Inspect & modify state.

Advanced Terraform Features:

• Workspaces → Manage multiple environments (dev, staging, prod).
• Dynamic Blocks → Simplify repetitive configurations.
• Terraform Cloud/Enterprise → Scalable collaboration & governance.

Terraform is widely used in DevOps, Cloud Engineering, and SRE for reproducible, scalable, and automated infrastructure.