Day-23 | Azure Zero to Hero | Getting Started with Terraform for Azure | Complete Setup - VS Code

This Azure Zero to Hero episode demonstrates managing Azure resources with Terraform. It covers connecting Terraform to Azure, creating resources (VNet, subnet, NIC, VM, public IP) using HCL, managing state files, migrating state to Azure Blob Storage, and best practices. The video also explains why Terraform is preferred over Azure's native tools for infrastructure as code. This segment contrasts using Terraform with other Azure automation tools and the Azure UI, highlighting Terraform's cross-cloud compatibility as a key advantage for DevOps engineers working across multiple cloud platforms. It emphasizes the efficiency and time-saving benefits of using Terraform over manual configuration. This segment expands on the previous point, detailing a scenario where a DevOps engineer works with multiple cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP). It strongly advocates for Terraform's unified approach, eliminating the need to learn individual cloud provider's automation tools. This segment explains Terraform's architecture, showing how it interacts with Azure Resource Manager and other cloud providers' APIs. It clarifies the "API-as-Code" concept, explaining how Terraform translates HCL code into API requests, simplifying the process for developers.This segment defines "Infrastructure-as-Code," explaining how Terraform and similar tools allow developers to define infrastructure in code. It summarizes Terraform's key advantages: multi-cloud support, abstraction of API complexities, and a reduced learning curve. This segment introduces helpful Visual Studio Code plugins for Terraform development and emphasizes the importance of using the official documentation to understand required parameters and configurations. It also shows how to identify mandatory fields within the configuration. This segment highlights the crucial step of configuring the provider in Terraform, explaining how to specify the Azure RM provider and its version. The presenter emphasizes the importance of this configuration for Terraform to understand which platform and provider version to use when creating resources. The segment also covers the process of executing the Terraform script and interpreting the results. This segment focuses on efficient resource management techniques within Terraform. The presenter demonstrates how to avoid hardcoding values by dynamically referencing resource properties, improving code reusability and maintainability. The explanation of how resource group names and locations are accessed and used across multiple resources is particularly insightful. This segment provides a concise, practical demonstration of building Azure resources using Terraform, starting from basic setup and explaining key concepts like resource grouping, variable usage for resource naming, and region selection. The presenter clearly shows how to copy and paste code snippets from the documentation, modify them, and understand their function within the broader context of the project. This segment demonstrates how to find and use the Azure provider documentation to create a virtual machine in Azure using Terraform. It shows how to locate the necessary code snippets and integrate them into a Terraform configuration file. This segment addresses the challenges of managing state files in team environments. The presenter explains the need for a centralized state file storage and demonstrates how to configure Azure Blob Storage as a backend for Terraform state files. The segment highlights security concerns related to local state file storage and the benefits of using a centralized solution. This segment details the practical steps of configuring a remote backend for Terraform using Azure Blob Storage. It covers creating the storage account and container, obtaining the access key (with security considerations), initializing Terraform with the backend configuration, and verifying state file management by adding and removing the state file, demonstrating how Terraform interacts with the remote backend for state management, including reading and writing state information from the Azure storage. The presenter also discusses security best practices for storing the access key, suggesting the use of environment variables or dedicated secret management solutions like Azure Key Vault or HashiCorp Vault. This segment demonstrates the use of SSH public keys for secure authentication when creating Azure virtual machines with Terraform. The presenter explains the advantages of using SSH keys over username/password authentication and shows how to replace the password configuration with SSH key configuration. The introduction of `terraform plan` as a dry run before applying changes is also valuable.This segment explains the importance of `terraform plan` as a dry run to verify the changes before applying them to the Azure platform. The presenter demonstrates how to use `terraform plan` to see what resources will be created, modified, or deleted, and then uses `terraform apply` to actually create the resources. The segment emphasizes the importance of verifying the plan before applying changes to avoid unintended consequences.