Cloud computing fundamentals and best practices
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If you have been following this series, every example so far has used AWS. But Terraform is cloud-agnostic, and Azure is one of the most well-supported providers in the ecosystem. The AzureRM provider has 700+ resource types covering everything from VMs to Cosmos DB to AKS. This post walks you through Azure fundamentals with Terraform — authentication, resource groups, networking, and a full Linux VM deployment.
Every time someone types your domain name into a browser, a DNS query races across the internet to find the IP address of your server. If DNS is slow, broken, or misconfigured, nothing else matters — your app is invisible. Route 53 is AWS's DNS service, and it does far more than translate names to IPs. It routes traffic intelligently, performs health checks, and can failover to a backup region in seconds.
Every AWS workload starts with a VPC. Click through the console once and you might get it right. Click through it for the fifth project and you will definitely get something wrong — a missing route, a misconfigured NAT gateway, a subnet that accidentally got a public IP. Terraform eliminates that problem. You define the network once, version it, and deploy identical VPCs across accounts, regions, and environments. This post builds a production-ready VPC from the ground up.
Your API receives three requests per hour on weekdays and zero on weekends, but your VM runs 24/7 costing you $70 a month. That is the exact problem serverless computing solves. Azure Functions lets you write code that runs only when triggered — and you pay only for execution time measured in milliseconds. No server provisioning, no capacity planning, no idle compute burning money.
Your Terraform code works perfectly in dev. Now you need the same infrastructure in staging and production, but with different instance sizes, different CIDR blocks, and different resource counts. You could copy the entire directory three times. Or you could use workspaces — Terraform's built-in mechanism for managing multiple instances of the same configuration with isolated state.
You've been clicking through the AWS Console for weeks, creating VPCs, subnets, security groups, and EC2 instances by hand. Then someone says "recreate this in the staging account." Suddenly, your 47-step runbook doesn't feel so clever. CloudFormation fixes this: you describe your infrastructure in a YAML file, and AWS builds it exactly the same way every single time.