It’s safe to say that Terraform has changed the way many companies build and manage cloud infrastructure. Rather than manually configuring resources through a cloud provider’s interface, team members can simply define the infrastructure as code and develop repeatable environments.
And that’s definitely a major thing! However, what you need to know is that there’s a certain step that you cannot allow yourself to overlook, and that is designing the cloud architecture before you start writing the Terraform code.
Yes, you may think that it’s smart to open a Terraform file and begin defining virtual networks, servers, databases, and security groups instantly, but that doesn’t mean that this method is actually good.
You need to take some time to think through the architecture, because that’s time-effective and will also lower technical debt!
Bear In Mind That Terraform Is A Tool!
Terraform is great at telling cloud platforms exactly what resources to spin up and how to configure them, but it isn’t going to do the heavy lifting for your strategy. It won’t automatically figure out whether your app needs one network or five, how your workloads should talk to each other, or what level of backup redundancy your business actually requires.
Those are pure architecture decisions. Before you even touch a keyboard to write code, your team needs to have a crystal-clear picture of what you are actually trying to build. That means nailing down your application requirements, expected traffic spikes, security protocols, uptime goals, data storage needs, and everyday operational limits.
Once those choices are locked in, Terraform becomes a million times more useful because your code finally has a well-defined purpose.
At Some Point, You’ll Need To Consult Experts!
The reality is that not every firm is equipped with cloud connoisseurs. You can have a team that is able to write Terraform but doesn’t have enough experience in terms of designing security-sensitive cloud environments, and such.
In these types of situations, you need to allow professionals to step in! You can consider having senior Terraform engineers billed by the hour when you are searching for specialized assistance without committing to anything that’s long-term. What’s crucial is to ensure that the expertise is leveraged for the right issue.
Speaking of this, bear in mind that just because you’ll be collaborating with somebody who is capable of writing Terraform fast, it doesn’t instantly mean they will solve an underlying architecture problem.
But on a more positive note, with the assistance of a seasoned engineer, you can properly address certain issues, go through the design, and ultimately, translate the agreed architecture into maintainable infrastructure code.
Good cloud architecture always starts with your business goals rather than the shiny technology itself.
Before you touch any tech, you need to grill yourself with a few key questions:
- How devastating is a few minutes of downtime?
- What kind of traffic spikes are you expecting?
- Do things need to scale up automatically?
- What data absolutely must be locked down?
- Are there strict industry compliance rules to follow?
- How fast do you need to bounce back from a total outage?
- What does the infrastructure budget actually look like?
The answers to these questions will completely rewrite your final design. A tiny, internal app for your staff definitely doesn’t need a massive, hyper-complicated multi-region setup.
On the flip side, a major customer-facing platform that cannot go down will absolutely need rock-solid redundancy spread across multiple availability zones or regions. If you don’t nail down these business realities first, your team is highly likely to build something that is either way too weak for the job or unnecessarily complex and expensive.
Networking is one of those areas where architecture planning plays an integral role. Before you create Terraform resources, you first need to figure out how you are going to structure your cloud environment.
There are a number of different decisions you’ll need to make in these situations, and they include the following:
- Subnets
- Virtual networks
- Private endpoints
- Routing
- Network segmentation
- Firewalls
- Load balancers
Trying to determine every single one of these things, while concurrently writing Terraform, can actually be pretty challenging, making it hard to understand the code. Consequently, it would be advisable to use a simple architectural diagram because it is designed to provide your team with a visual representation of how different parts communicate before these relationships are translated into code.
It’s easy to see that Terraform is an extremely beneficial tool that’s intended to automate cloud infrastructure, but that doesn’t mean that you should write Terraform code first. Architecture should be a priority, and that’s the whole point of this informative guide.
