Our great sponsors
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terraform
Terraform enables you to safely and predictably create, change, and improve infrastructure. It is a source-available tool that codifies APIs into declarative configuration files that can be shared amongst team members, treated as code, edited, reviewed, and versioned.
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Pulumi
Pulumi - Infrastructure as Code in any programming language. Build infrastructure intuitively on any cloud using familiar languages 🚀
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WorkOS
The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.
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Terraform is an open-source tool from Hashicorp for Infrastructure as Code, initially released in 2014. It uses the declarative HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL), which from the earliest releases immediately seemed friendlier to the writing of infrastructure. Once a user invokes Terraform on a given resource, Terraform performs CRUD actions via the cloud provider's API to obtain the desired state. The code can be factored into modules, promoting reusability and maintainability.
There are other tools that use programming languages for writing infrastructure code, and which are available for use on other cloud providers: for example, Pulumi or cdktf. However, these tools do not have the same advantages, as they still use API calls (so there is no rollback) and save the state of the infrastructure in special files that have to be managed.
Cloudformation is the Infrastructure as Code service of AWS. It has been active since 2011 (it seems like yesterday, but in the cloud era we are talking about geological eras before that), free of charge, and uses descriptive languages such as JSON and YAML (the latter as of 2016, to the relief of many) to create templates in which the resources to be created on AWS are defined. These templates are processed by the Cloudformation service, which creates the resources as described. If we want to change our infrastructure, we simply re-execute the modified template.
Over the past few months I have been using AWS CDK for some projects, and every time I started talking about it, someone would ask: why should I abandon the tool I am using and switch to CDK? What advantages does it offer?