terraform VS terragrunt

2. Terraform (hashicorp/terraform) – Infrastructure as Code

Terraform is used to manage infrastructure. You can define your servers, databases, and networks in code, and Terraform will create them for you. It’s like DevOps magic. Written in Go.

Terraform: https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform

Terraform or OpenTofu for infra as code

For more information on Docker, you can refer to the official Docker documentation and explore relevant open-source projects on Docker's GitHub. Additionally, for Terraform-related resources, check out the official Terraform documentation and Terraform GitHub.

In this post, I will share WebRTC.ventures' best practices in automating the deployment of AI-powered voice assistants for Amazon Connect, moving beyond manual, click-by-click setups to a robust, scalable Infrastructure as Code (IaC) approach. We’ll explore how to manage both static and dynamic resources, leverage tools like Terraform and AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM), and even set up an automated deployment pipeline using Github Actions to deploy your conversational IVR solutions efficiently.

We manage infrastructure with Terraform and lean heavily on GitHub Actions for CI/CD. Very simple but it works! Oh and a lot of bash scripts of course.

You can download Terraform from terraform.io and install it on your machine.

Claude also created the IAC for deploying the app on Hetzner, using Terraform as the configuration tool. I only had to provide my Hetzner API key for VPS resource provisioning and my Cloudflare API key for domain name DNS entry management. 🌐

Terraform Installed: Download and install Terraform from the website: https://www.terraform.io/

Terragrunt https://terragrunt.gruntwork.io A thin wrapper that helps organize your infrastructure into reusable modules — even works with OpenTofu.

Terragrunt if you want to go deeper down the rabbit hole

Link: https://terragrunt.gruntwork.io

name: Deploy on: push: branches: - main pull_request: branches: - main jobs: terraform: runs-on: ubuntu-latest steps: - name: Checkout repository uses: actions/checkout@v2 - name: Setup SSH uses: webfactory/[email protected] with: ssh-private-key: ${{ secrets.SSH_PRIVATE_KEY }} - name: Setup Terraform uses: hashicorp/setup-terraform@v2 with: terraform_version: 1.5.5 terraform_wrapper: false - name: Setup Terragrunt run: | curl -LO "https://github.com/gruntwork-io/terragrunt/releases/download/v0.48.1/terragrunt_linux_amd64" chmod +x terragrunt_linux_amd64 sudo mv terragrunt_linux_amd64 /usr/local/bin/terragrunt terragrunt -v - name: Apply Terraform changes run: | cd dev terragrunt run-all apply -auto-approve --terragrunt-non-interactive -var AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=$AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID -var AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=$AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY -var AWS_REGION=$AWS_DEFAULT_REGION cd bastion-ec2 ip=$(terragrunt output instance_public_ip) echo "$ip" echo "$ip" > public_ip.txt cat public_ip.txt pwd env: AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID: ${{ secrets.AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID }} AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY: ${{ secrets.AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY }} AWS_DEFAULT_REGION: ${{ secrets.AWS_DEFAULT_REGION }}

Terraform. I use it to manage infrastructure. It simplifies many things if at least a few people work on a project. As the project grows, it becomes massive, and maybe for better state management, you will need tools like Terragrunt to keep infrastructure-related code simple. If you use AWS as a cloud provider, you can also use AWS CDK. It’s a nice tool with Typescript support, but it’s available only for AWS, and if you need something from a different cloud infrastructure, the code will be much more complex than Terraform. That’s why I prefer the Terraform even for AWS.

You need to ensure your Action code is built before you attempt a terrform plan or apply. In our case we are using terragrunt which has a helpful before_hook, setup in the terragrunt.hcl file as follows:

https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/issues/19932

My understanding is that people that have this as a first-class concern use something like Terragrunt to dynamically generate the HCL as needed.

https://terragrunt.gruntwork.io/

For Burrow here, I was was focused on shipping something and didn't want to spend time on generating that code just yet. But the project has gotten some attention so if this is a recurring request I'll probably do it.

Note that I intentionally chose the 17 AWS regions that are default enabled in every new AWS account, so it should only be if you want to customize it that this becomes important.

A Cloudformation Stacks based deployment to achieve multi-region would be another good (and perhaps better) option here. I could add that to the Makefile, with inspiration from your link there.

Terragrunt started to use OpenTofu as the default IAC tool, however, this was not a major release; instead, it was provided as a patch and users didn't expect to have any differences in the behavior. The original problem may be found here.

Next, head over to the Terragrunt GitHub page to download it.