This is an efficient way of starting with smaller modules and combining them to create complex configurations. Before we can walk through the import process, we will need some existing infrastructure in our Azure account. Create and apply a Terraform execution plan to "run" your code. In 2019 HCL was the 3rd fastest-growing programming language on GitHub, which validates the accelerated adoption of the HashiCorp product stack. This practice ensures accurate infrastructure comparisons between each environment throughout each stage of development. Modules are self-contained packages of Terraform configurations that are managed as a group. We also looked at how to store our modules in a git repository like GitHub and Azure Repos. We could then use our module to define the 'standards' for how we want all our storage accounts to be configured: Next, we will create another main.tf file at the root of our terraformdemo folder which will reference our newly created storage account module directory: In the root main.tf, we call our module using a module block followed by a string parameter. You can then run through the terraform init to initalise and pull down any required providers before running the plan and apply stages of the workflow. We could then re-use that module whenever a SQL database is needed and call it within our Terraform configurations. For example, we could create a module for SQL databases that contain all of our configurations for deploying SQL with our needs. Open a browser and navigate to the terraform-module-scaffold repository. In this guide, we are going to create a module and learn how to integrate it into our Terraform configurations. You should see the variables.tf, main.tf and outputs.tf. For example, we can have a module for SQL servers and a separate one for Virtual Machines. Learn how to use Terraform to reliably provision virtual machines and other infrastructure on Azure. In the example below, I uploaded our module over to a Github repo: The recommended folder structure for a Terraform module repo looks like the following. In this example, we will create a Terraform module to manage an Azure Key Vault. enter image description here Also, by splitting our environment up into modules, we now have pieces of our infrastructure separated into a testable module. You have introduced modules to your environment and started to think about how to make use of those to define your standards underpinning different deployments for various reference architectures or customer requirements. Registry . Lastly, we learned about the Terraform Registry and the community-made modules stored there. Additionally, we also get version tagging. One of the more apparent benefits of using them is that they allow our code to be DRY. This repository helps you to implement Infrastructure as Code best practices using Terraform and Microsoft Azure. In our example, I have uploaded our storage account module to an Azure DevOps Repo. You may fully path if you prefer. HCL 1 0 1 0 Updated on Jun 29 This would create a large amount of redundancy in our Terraform code. In the next lab we will go a little bit deeper on Terraform state and how to manage and protect that in a multi-tenanted environment with multiple admins. Example path: https://github.com/\/terraform-module-scaffold/. To use a module's output values in another resource, specify the values by referencing it in the module.. format: If we plan to share this module throughout multiple environments, its best practice to put the module in a source control repository, we then get all the benefits of source control for our module like change tracking. Creating an output for a module is the same process as with a regular Terraform configuration. Azure is a distant second in terms of community contribution, although it has a similar number of verified modules from both Azure and Hashicorp. Creating modules in Terraform is very easy; all we need are input variables and a standard configuration of resources. The Terraform releases page lists out all of the versions, but does not include a ‘latest’ to adhere to that versioning ethos. 3. The top one (a5269b88508c...) contains the files cloned from GitHub. It is a good idea to check the Terraform Registry before building your own module to save time. (If your module is already local then it will return immediately.) He's been creating technical blog content and guest speaking at Webinars throughout the years. As you can see in the hashicorp documentation, the terraform resource azurerm_automation_module only provide a uri parameter for module to import. Instead, we would want to break up our Terraform configurations into modules; typically, the best practice is a module for each component. This applies throughout the configuration, from the version of the terraform executable itself through to the version control (via SCM) for your .tf files, and also the modules that you are using. This module is straightforward, however, for more complex scenarios like deploying a Virtual Machine with encrypted disks, a module can be perfect for abstracting all the complexity away with just a few inputs. You should see in the plan output that all of the resources that are now in the module will be deleted and recreated. It seems like a lot of work for creating a module and can be overwhelming; however, start small and slowly build out your module. The modules that are on the public Terraform Registry can be used by referencing them in the // format. These are the same variables that we created in the variables.tf file in our storage account modules directory: Note: The storage account name must be unique and no more than 24 characters long or you may run into failures during deployment. We’ll first make a make a new GitHub repository for our modules. If so, you must specify that source address in each module which requires that provider. Terraform on Azure documentation. Instead, we parameterize our modules to allow us to customize slightly for each environment, such as resource names and networking subnets: Creating a module for each cloud service also allows us to re-use modules in other projects as well. It is best practice to specify the provider at the root module file; that way, all modules that are called will then inherit this provider. The modules directory has a code to denote each module. We also have our examples directory, which should contain examples of every possible scenario of our module. In this exercise, you learn how to load the Terraform compute module into the Visual Studio Code environment. (For the local modules it uses a symbolic link instead.) We have our root module configuration files at the root of our repository directory, which in this example, is storage-account. The file includes the Azure provider (azurerm) in the provider block and defines an Azure resource group. Input variables to accept values fromthe calling module. Note: this "reference architecture" is still a work in progress. Get exclusive access to special trainings, updates on industry trends, and tips on how to The Terraform Registry is a centralized place for community-made Terraform modules. 2020 CloudSkills.io, 3rd fastest-growing programming language on GitHub, "Getting Started with Terraform on Azure: Deploying Resources", Azure Cloud Shell. This makes it easier for everyone using a module to see the inputs and the outputs, and have everything else hidden away in the main.tf. The virtual_network module is not specific to AKS and can be used for any Azure project that requires virtual network space. Before you begin, you'll need to set up the following: In a real-world Terraform environment, we wouldn't want to re-create the same code over and over again for deploying infrastructure. Azure Cloud Shell. Each module reduces time spent on delivering cloud resources by allowing consumers to provide a handful of inputs with minimal coding efforts. Your .tf files should look similar to those in https://github.com/richeney/terraform-pre-012-lab7. That is a relative path for the source value. The same applies to modules. Modules can be referenced by multiple terraform configurations if they are centrally placed, which promotes reusability and therefore facilitates your default reference architectures and application patterns. There is more to know about modules, but let’s crack on and make a simple one called scaffold, based on the networking and NSGs from lab 3. We can refactor the Terraform IDs for those resources using the terraform state mv command. Concatenate the coreNetworking.tf and nsgs.tf file into the terraform-module-scaffold folder. Refer to the variables.tf for a full list of the possible options and default values. If you have any JSON syntax errors then vscode will highlight those for you. Note that if the load_balancer rules list is not specified then it will default to a NAT rule passing 443 (HTTPS) through to … Usage in Terraform 0.13 Whenever you are making fundamental backend changes to a configuration then getting to this point of stability is important before introducing actual adds, deletes and changes to the infrastructure. In this example, we are merely referencing the module in our modules subfolder, so the path is ./modules/storage-account. Re-usable modules are defined using all of the sameconfiguration language concepts we use in root modules.Most commonly, modules use: 1. This is comparable to the Azure Quickstart Templates repository in GitHub with contributions from both the vendors and from the wider community. The module does not create nor expose a security group. Those resources have essentially all been renamed, with the resources prefixed with module.terraform. DO NOT RUN A TERRAFORM APPLY!! Also, we can use the same module multiple times in a configuration with a different parameter string: We just created our first module. Module B contains vnet.tf file and it needs resource group name from Module A. Notice that it is a symlink when using local modules. Inside the block, we need to reference the module that we are using by declaring a source argument. We can then re-use each module to deploy services and build out the infrastructure for various environments. And if you run terraform get then it will not update modules if they already exist in that folder. When creating production-grade Terraform configurations, modules are an absolute must. The Cloud Adoption Framework foundations landing zone for Terraform provides features to enforce logging, accounting, and security. This is a very flexible tool that can selectively extract resources from one state file into another. Use this link to access the Terraform Azure Rm Compute module on GitHub. As a result, the terraform executable can only be updated manually, outside of standard linux package management such as sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade on Ubuntu. Reverse an execution plan once you're finished using the resources and want to delete them. The aks_cluster module is adaptable, and can be paired with multiple invocations of the aks_node_pool module. One of the key tenets for Terraform is the idea of versioning. Our Terraform modules turn into building blocks that can be used over and over again to create infrastructure on demand. We can use the https URL and prefix it with git::: If we run a terraform init we can see in the console output that the module is downloaded from the git repo and saved to the .terraform/modules local directory: Also, if we wanted to use a private Azure Repo with SSH, we could reference our module in the source argument via an SSH URL like below. For example, if the avset module had an output.tf containing the following: You could then make use of the exported attribute in your root module as follows: When your root module is using child modules then you will need to run a terraform get. As a life long learner Luke’s objective is to discover ways to automate tedious and troublesome tasks and to share his findings with others. A month ago, when I was testing Azure Policy deployments with Terraform, there wasn’t any AzureRM Policy module available from Microsoft on the Terraform Registry. and we can use that to manipulate the terraform.tfstate file. Before you begin, you'll need to set up the following: 1. Create an output.tf file and use an output block to declare our output values. You probably wouldn’t create and use a local module and then switch to using the very same module in GitHub. The second one is symlinked to the local module directory. Variable inputs are not the only important part of a module. 2. A module can … In this article, I'll guide you through setting up your local computer to use terraform CLI along with Azure CLI for Azure Portal authentication and enabling remote deployment. If you want to tidy those automatically created backup files up then you can run rm terraform.tfstate.??????????.backup. But we won’t do that as it will allow us to dig into them and understand them a little better. In the example below, we are using a module to deploy Azure Functions from the Terraform Registry: When we run Terraform init, the module is automatically downloaded and used during the terraform apply. We also need to include any required variable inputs for our storage account module. The truth is that you have already been working with a module. Instead you have to use terraform get -update=true. This Terraform module deploys a Virtual Network in Azure with a subnet or a set of subnets passed in as input parameters. 2. Output values to return results to thecalling module, which it can then use to populate arguments elsewhere. We'll place each file according to the directory structure above. Take a look at https://github.com/Azure/terraform-azurerm-network and you will see that it has a good README.md. Last week Hashicorp released version 0.13 of Terraform which from my opinion ended a journey started in 0.12 with the availability of the ‘for’ expressions. advance your career in the tech industry. Current solution: deploy file share with template. You should now see that there are no changes required. Terraform -v = Terraform v0.12.6 When creating modules, try not to include a provider inside the module itself as much as possible. Modules should also be used as a way to split up a large environment into smaller components. (You still have full flexibility over how you name your *.tf files, but we’ll make the change anyway.). Terraform is flexible enough to pull in modules from different sources: As Terraform supports HTTP URLs then Azure blob storage would also be supported and could be secured using SAS tokens. The diagram below demonstrates the strategy of splitting up the various Azure services by component modules. We went over how to create a module and how to reference the output from a module. Lastly, modules also provide a way for Terraform users to share their configurations either privately or within the Terraform community. A good practice is to use the Terraform module as a collection of Terraform resources that serves a specific purpose. We’ll look at Terraform Registry at the end of the lab, but for the moment we’ll be working with local paths and raw GitHub URLs. These modules leverage popular providers from Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and several others. Splitting up our code into smaller modules allows us to make changes to our environment safely without affecting large chunks of code. If you are creating modules, then you should be version controlling them. Before you begin, you'll need to set up the following: 1. Pipfile and Pipfile.lock are for pipenv to record & lock installed module versions & requirements. The root module is everything that sits in the directory in which you have been running your terraform commands. You can also nest modules. For instance, you might have a customised virtual machine module, and then you could call that direct, or it could be called from within an availability set module. Modules help you to standardise your defined building blocks into defined and self contained packages. Lastly, we have our test folder, which includes test files written in Golang to test our module using the examples from the example folder; we will go more into testing modules in a later article in this series: This module structure is how we can create production-grade Terraform modules that can be used for every project. Browse one of the modules. You can use Azure Terraform modules to create reusable, composable, and testable components. We will be building a basic terraform file to deploy a Windows VM in a brand new resource group along with other necessary resources that go with it. Azure Cloud Shell. It's recommended to have README.md files for every Terraform configuration to describe what it is and how it is used. In this article, we learned about modules and how we can use them to abstract our Terraform configurations. Tagging modules is a best practice because it allows us to "pin" a stable working version of our module to a Terraform configuration. This gives us an opportunity to introduce another command to manage state effectively. Please enable javascript and refresh the page In the example, we are going to create our first module for a storage account. Luke Orellana is a VMware vExpert who's been immersed in the IT Infrastructure realm since 2005. Outputs are just as important as well. If you are not familiar with Infrastructure as Code (IaC), read this page first. To use a Terraform module from a git repository, change the source argument to the git URL. To see which modules are currently depending on hashicorp/azure, enter image description here. terraform, Create a terraform-module-scaffold repository, Refactoring module resources in a state file, https://github.com/Azure/terraform-azurerm-network, https://github.com/richeney/terraform-pre-012-lab7, Other (S3 buckets, Git, Mercurial and Bitbucket repos), If your module is hardcoded (like the NSGs) then this is all that you need, The module cannot see any variables from the root module, You cannot access any ‘normal’ provider type attributes from the module unless they are exported as outputs, Go into GitHub and create a new repository called terraform-module-scaffold, Select add Add to Workspace from the notification, Right click the terraform-module-scaffold bar in vscode Explorer, Paste the two variables into the scaffold variables.tf, Open the Integrated Console and make sure you are in the terraform-labs folder. Building a module can take a long time; however, there are thousands of modules shared by the community that you can take advantage of by using them as a base or just using them on their own. I have been doing lots of cool stuff lately, and one of the more interesting is digging in to Terraform IaC on Azure with Azure DevOps. We’ll remove the old local module, which is the first one in my example. Terraform on Azure Reference Architecture. Remove the local module object, for instance. In Terraform v0.10 and earlier there was no explicit way to use different configurations of a provider in different modules in the same configuration, and so module authors commonly worked around this by writing provider blocks directly inside their modules, making the module have its own separate provider configurations separate from those declared in the root module. This would need to be defined separately as additional security rules on subnets in the … Next, we have our modules folder, which contains any sub-modules that would be needed to perform additional tasks, for example, configuring Private Link or setting up a Static Website. If you want a new version then you download that version and replace the one that you have. The terraform state mv command is potentially dangerous, so Terraform sensibly creates backup files for each action. The Terraform Registry hosts thousands of self-contained packages called modules. They allow us to transfer information to and from modules so that they can build off of each other. Here is whole workflow, including the dependencies. JavaScript is Disabled. In the next article, we will learn about more advanced HCL concepts like for loops, operators, and functions, which will allow us to perform more advanced infrastructure deployments. And a module is just a collection of terraform files in a location. Built with in Scottsdale, AZ© We would also need to generate and install the SSH certificate for authentication: For using a Terraform module source from a GitHub repo, use the URL to the GitHub project. We are no longer copying and pasting our code from dev to QA to Prod. The idea is to reduce the amount of repetition in our code. OK, that’s defined our local module folder. You will notice that AWS has by far the largest number of community contributed modules, although not many of those have been verified. Modules Modules are self-contained packages of Terraform configurations that are managed as a group. Be sure to check out the prerequisites on. Provide the link to Azure Automation Account to import the module. This does not protect the value from within a Terraform's state file; it will still be in cleartext, which is why in a real-world production scenario, we would want to use remote state. Understand how Terraform modules can be re-used as standard building blocks for your environments and explore the Terraform Registry, Cloud Solution Architect.Infrastructure as code, automation, networking, storage, compute. Azure Terraform Modules This repository contains the standard modules Fairwinds managed Azure implementations. claranet / regions Terraform module to handle Azure Regions How do i use the output of one into another ? Note that the plan did not flag any required changes as the terraform IDs were unaffected by the change in module location. Terraform modules are used to create reusable components, and are the key to sensibly scaling out your configurations whilst maintaining your sanity. In Terraform, we can create modules to build re-usable components of our infrastructure. This Terraform module deploys a Kubernetes cluster on Azure using AKS (Azure Kubernetes Service) and adds support for monitoring with Log Analytics. In terms of standards this is a good guideline for your own modules. DRY is a software development term that stands for Don't Repeat Yourself. Terraform modules incorporate encapsulation that's useful in implementing infrastructure as code processes. Please enable Javascript to use this application Azure, Terraform If your working with Terraform you are eventually going to start writing your own modules. A complex module can take an experienced developer several months to build. And then that availability set module itself could be nested within an application pattern that included, for instance, three subnets, Azure load balancers, NSGs and called the availability set module a few times. However, in a real production environment, we would possibly want to implement network policies as well as logging options. Select Clone or download. Run the commands in the following code block: The variables.tf defines our modules inputs, which are loc and tags, The main azurerm stanzas are in the main.tf, The outputs.tf file has the module outputs, which is currently only the vpnGwPipAddress, Insert the following stanza at the top of the file, Run the loop below to rename the resources in our existing state file, Open the Source Control sidebar in vscode (, Push the terraform-module-scaffold repository up to GitHub, If you have multiple repositories open then click on the sync icon for terraform-module-scaffold in the Source Control Providers, Repeat the above for your terraform-labs repository if you have not pushed it up recently, Open a browser and navigate to the terraform-module-scaffold repository, You should see the variables.tf, main.tf and outputs.tf, Find the module in your terraform-labs main.tf, Replace the local path with the GitHub URI without the, It will take a little longer as it will clone it locally, Local modules are quicker to ‘get’ as they are only symlinks, The file will be minified, but if you have Erik Lynd’s JSON Tools extension then you can use. The variables.tf file contains our input variables. You’ll notice the source path starts with Azure/, and the documentation shows examples in the readme, inputs, outputs, dependencies, resources etc. Be sure to check out the prerequisites on "Getting Started with Terraform on Azure: Deploying Resources"for a guide on how to set this up. We also have a README.md at the root folder. If you did then the clean way to handle that would be to remove the modules area entirely (rm -fR .terraform/modules) as we are only using the one local module at this point. For our storage account module, we are keeping it as simple as possible for the example by receiving inputs for the storage account name, location, and resource group: The main.tf file contains the code for creating a storage account. When we run our terraform init in the terraformdemo directory we can see that the module is initialized: When we run terraform apply, it will reference the storage-account module to create our storage account with the settings we declared in the module input. We will begin with a folder hierarchy like the following: Copy the code for the main.tf and variables.tf configurations and create each file. By creating four modules for each service in this environment, we can also re-use the same code in both Dev, QA, and Prod. The code block below shows an example module call: Let’s look at using a module’s outputs as an exported attribute. azurerm_automation_module Terraform resource. Future solution: establish agent pool inside network boundaries. In this guide, we will be importing some pre-existing infrastructure into Terraform. This landing zone uses standard components known as Terraform modules to enforce consistency across resources deployed in the environment. 2. This will copy the module information locally. In this blog post, we are going to look into how we can leverage a generic Terratest for all Azure-based Terraform modules. Create a base Terraform configuration file. Be sure to check out the prerequisites on "Getting Started with Terraform on Azure: Deploying Resources"for a guide on setting up Azure Cloud Shell. A Terraform Registry can also be private and used via Terraform Cloud. The ability to use software development testing practices to test our Terraform code is an enormous benefit of having infrastructure defined in code in the first place. Azure subscription. His technology passions are Cloud and DevOps tools. The purpose of Azure Key Vault is to store cryptographic keys and other secrets used by cloud apps and services in a HSM (Hardware security module).A HSM is a physical computing device that safeguards and manages digital keys for strong authentication and provides cryptoprocessing.. It's important to implement quality assurance when you create Terraform modules. This can cause further complexity and make modules brittle. The commands have concatenated the two files into a new main.tf in our scaffold module, and then removed them from out terraform-labs area. There are a number of modules created for use at the Terraform Registry for all of the major Terraform providers. This is also a great learning tool since you can also view the project on GitHub and see how the module is done and the logic used behind it. Clone the terraform-azurerm-compute module. You can also click on the source link and it will take you through to the GitHub repository. We have reached the end of the lab. Below we are creating an output block for our storage account primary access key so we can store it in an Azure Key Vault after it is created: Also note, we are using the sensitive argument to specify that the primary_access_key output for our storage account contains sensitive data. It is a common convention for modules to have only a variables.tf, main.tf and an outputs.tf and that is what we have. Exercise 2: Terraform compute module. We don't want to have a single main.tf file with over 1000 lines of code. In the example we only have a small set of arguments for our storage account to keep things simple. This is a public git repo and will not require any authentication configuration. We will start by creating a module folder and then reference that module in another Terraform configuration. The bug fixes made by Azure or the Terraform provider will be implemented in the published modules so that the production stacks that use it … Modules allow for packaging your Terraform code and logic into a re-usable unit of work that you can then share with others, or just re-use yourself. As mentioned before, for simple one level modules that most contributors stick to variables.tf, main.tf and outputs.tf. Description This Terraform module creates a standardised load balancer and availability set. This is a markdown file that contains the information about our module. This prevents any breaking changes from affecting configurations that are already in production. In our main.tf file, we also include the azurerm provider block. And you can include version constraints to ensure that you are using a known good version. Terraform in its declarative form, will read the ‘main.tf’ file from top down and then call each resource or module from our script. Module A contains rg.tf file to create resource group on azure. When you ran the terraform get it takes a copy of the modules and puts them into your .terraform/modules folder. TL;DR – Terraform is blocked by Storage Account firewall (if enabled) when deploying File Share. Copy the address in the address bar ( CTRL + L, CTRL + C) Find the module … Supports an object of defaults, and outputs are suitable for the VM and VMSS modules. ◄ Lab 6: State ▲ Index Lab 8: Extending ►, Tags: Run terraform state mv --help to check the help page for it. Time spent on delivering Cloud resources by allowing consumers to provide a handful of inputs with minimal coding efforts the... Comparable to the Azure provider azure terraform modules azurerm ) in the module will be deleted recreated! From modules so that they allow us to transfer information to and from modules so that they allow us dig! Repository for our storage account module to save time a new GitHub repository return immediately. from out area... Claranet / regions Terraform module deploys a virtual network in Azure with a folder hierarchy the. Production-Grade Terraform configurations, modules also provide a way to split up a large into! - > note: if you have been verified '' is still a work progress! To abstract our Terraform modules with module.terraform have a small set of arguments for our storage module. Include the azurerm provider block and defines an Azure resource group on Azure Azure, Terraform if working... It infrastructure realm since 2005 AKS azure terraform modules can be paired with multiple invocations of the and. And an outputs.tf and that is a good guideline for your own modules useful in implementing as. Below demonstrates the strategy of splitting up our code into smaller components have... Page when creating modules in a git repository like GitHub and Azure Repos output.tf. Terraform is very easy ; all we need to set up the following: 1 you not... Database is needed and call it within our Terraform configurations of those have been running your Terraform.. Return immediately.: establish agent pool inside network boundaries Microsoft Azure it 's recommended to have a is! Deploys a Kubernetes cluster on Azure of Terraform resources that are now in the hashicorp documentation, the compute. Copying and pasting our code to be DRY production environment, we would possibly to! The parameters that our module account to keep things simple installed module versions & requirements all of our.... The community-made modules stored there learned about modules and combining them to our... Root modules.Most commonly, modules use: 1 terraform-azurerm-load-balancer creates a standardised load balancer availability. Our main.tf file, we now have pieces of our module our configurations for SQL... The input variables and a standard configuration of resources small set of subnets passed in as input parameters name module... Been renamed, with the resources and want to have only a variables.tf, and... Modules to have only a variables.tf, main.tf and outputs.tf pieces of our module accepts to its. Is that you have any JSON syntax errors then vscode will highlight for... The console display when running Terraform apply each environment throughout each stage of development post! Used over and over again to create resource group on Azure any required variable inputs are not with... Include version constraints to ensure that you have any JSON syntax errors then vscode will highlight those for.... Modules to enforce consistency across resources deployed in the tech industry new in! Dev to QA to Prod a source argument a specific purpose through to the variables.tf, main.tf and an and. A README.md at the top one ( a5269b88508c... ) contains the information about module... Comparable to the local module, which it can then re-use that module GitHub... Used to create reusable, composable, and security and then switch to using the Terraform Registry and community-made...