Terraform Projects and Use Cases

Statista (2023) states that Terraform is ranked second among the highly preferred cloud configuration tools. It is a tool extensively used by small and medium-sized enterprises for infrastructure automation. That’s why there is always a huge demand for Terraform professionals in the job market.

You can accelerate your career by sharpening your hands-on experience on Terraform. Now, it raises a question: How can I enhance practical skills in Terraform? The answer is simple – working on projects. This blog discusses Terraform projects elaborately to help you out.

Let's get started!

Table of Contents

• What is Terraform?
• Why Terraform Projects
• Prerequisites for Terraform Projects
• Skills you will develop
• Terraform Projects
• Real-time Terraform Project Ideas
• Summary
• FAQs

What is Terraform?

Terraform is a robust infrastructure automation tool. You can perform resource provisioning and management with Terraform. You can manage resources in the cloud or data center using Terraform.

The prime thing about this tool is that it is an infrastructure as code (IaC) tool. So, it is easy to manage infrastructure using a configuration file. The file is usually written in the HCL language. With Terraform, you can automate infrastructure such as databases, servers, etc.

Moreover, you can deploy serverless applications using Terraform with AWS Lambda. Terraform helps to manage Kubernetes clusters on various cloud platforms. The platforms can be AWS, Microsoft Azure, etc. Well! Now, you have got a basic idea about the Terraform tool. Next, we will jump into the section that briefs why Terraform projects are critical.

If you want to enrich your career and become a professional in Terraform, then enroll in "Terraform Online Training" - This course will help you to achieve excellence in this domain.

Why Terraform Projects

The best way to master Terraform is to work on Terraform projects. Only your hands-on skills will boost your expertise in Terraform - no matter how much theory knowledge you have acquired. You can polish your skills in resource provisioning, configuration, and management by practicing Terraform projects.

By grooming your Terraform skills, you can make a promising career in the Terraform domain. PayScale says Terraform professionals earn over 10 LPA in India on average. In the USA, they get a salary of around 121k USD per year on average.

So, learning Terraform projects is extremely important since it fine-tunes your hands-on skills. This blog discusses various Terraform projects in detail. 

Now, It begs the question: Are there any requirements to start working on Terraform projects? Don't worry! The following section lists the essentials to work on Terraform projects. 

Let’s take a look at them.

  Prerequisites for Terraform Projects

Before diving into the Terraform projects, one must ensure that they meet the following requirements.

• Basic knowledge of cloud computing and various cloud platforms
• Knowledge of the Linux operating system
• Basic coding skills in Python and YAML languages and JSON file format.
• Decent knowledge of Terraform fundamentals, Terraform CLI, and workflows
• Basic understanding of functions, variables, and data structures.
• Exposure to source code editors like Visual Studio Code
• Strong problem-solving and analytical skills

Yes! If you fulfill the requirements mentioned above, then practicing Terraform projects will be a piece of cake.

 It’s no wonder if you pose a question – what skills will I gain by completing Terraform projects? No problem! Coming up is the section that will outline the skills.

Skills you will develop

Following are the skills that one will develop by working on Terraform projects.

• Mastery of creating and managing resources in a cloud environment
• Strong proficiency in creating and modifying configurations using the Terraform configuration Language
• Gain comprehensive knowledge of the CI/CD pipeline
• Solid Exposure to orchestration tools like Puppet and Ansible
• Expertise in setting up secure container infrastructure
• Exposure to configuration and version management.
• Familiar with containerization tools like Docker and Kubernetes.
• Expertise in boosting the performance of cloud platform infrastructure.
• Exceptional time management and collaboration skills

Okay! It's time to dive into the Terraform projects.

Terraform Projects

In this section, MindMajix’s subject experts have grouped Terraform projects into two categories based on their complexity – Terraform projects for beginners and experienced.

Let's go through the projects one by one.

Terraform Projects for Beginners

This set of projects will help you better understand building pipelines, infrastructure optimization, Terraform configurations, and many more.

 Let's go over now! 

• Building AWS infrastructure using Terraform

In this Terraform project, you will learn to build AWS infrastructure using Terraform. This project deals with EC2 instances, internet gateways, route tables, security groups like SSH, etc. You will become familiar with elastic IP and its association with EC2 instances.

Completing this project will expose you to Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), auto-scaling, NAT gateway, ALB, and certificate manager. You will learn to build VPC using the CIDR block. It is possible to understand how to create an internet gateway. Moreover, you will know how to connect the gateway with a VPC.

• Cloud Resource Optimization

This project creates an infrastructure optimization solution. You will learn to manage resources in three stages: write, plan, and apply. In the ‘write’ stage, you will define the resources and create an execution plan in the ‘plan’ stage. The plan is implemented in the ‘apply’ stage.

You will learn to analyze cloud resources by working on this Terraform project. You will get exposure to cloud cost management and optimization. Plus, you will get acquainted with using APIs to manage resources.

• Terraform with Jenkins

This project demonstrates managing workflows and performing AWS 3-tier deployment using Terraform. You will learn to build pipelines using the Jenkins tool in this project. You will learn to install the Terraform plugin on Jenkins. Additionally, you will learn to install the Terraform binary.

By practicing this project, you will gain a broad understanding of AWS 3-tier architecture, Jenkins pipeline integration, and deployments using Terragrunts. Moreover, you will get proficient with the Ansible playbook, load configuration to S3, and more.

• Automating deployment of resources in AWS

In this project, you will deploy resources in the AWS platform using Terraform configuration files. You will learn how to use network interface, elastic IP, and internet gateway elaborately.

By doing this project, you will be familiar with creating EC2 instances. You will learn how to deploy the instances in the custom VPC. You will also learn how to assign IP addresses in a custom subnet. You will be exposed to automating a web server to manage web traffic.

• Infrastructure Security with Terraform

In this project, you will construct an infrastructure security solution with Terraform. You will learn to put in place security policies across cloud infrastructure. Mainly, you will define security configuration in codes.

By working on this project, you will master security best practices and compliance standards. You will get exposure to pre-built templates or Terraform modules. The templates help to provide security services like security groups. You will get to know about private and public modules in this project.

• Serverless deployment with Terraform

This project teaches you to create, manage, and deploy serverless applications. You will get conversant with using serverless applications. They can be Amazon API Gateway, Google Cloud Functions, AWS Lambda functions, etc.

Completing this project will familiarize you with integrating Terraform with many serverless technologies. You will gain a comprehensive knowledge of infrastructure lifecycle management through this project.

Sure! The projects might have given the basic idea of how to use Terraform to deploy applications in the AWS cloud, work with serverless components, and more. Next, we will move on to complex projects to heighten your practical skills.

Projects for Experienced

 Let’s read through the advanced Terraform projects in this section. It will familiarize you with disaster recovery solutions, continuous integration, container deployment, and more using Terraform.

• Terragrunt

Terragrunt is used as a thin wrapper for Terraform. You can leverage Terragrunt to avoid repeating Terraform configurations altogether. Simply put, it supports DRY (Do not Repeat Yourself) codes. It means you need to define your Terraform code only once, even though you deal with multiple cloud environments.

Working on this project will expose you to version and environment management. You will understand how to manage remote sites as well as many environments. You will learn to keep your remote state configuration and CLI flags DRY. Also, getting a broad idea of executing Terraform commands on multiple modules is possible through this project.

• Kubernetes Cluster Deployment

This project uses a simple configuration file to deploy applications in Kubernetes clusters. This configuration file defines the resources that should be deployed in the clusters.

By learning this project, you will become familiar with creating NodePorts and publishing applications in Kubernetes. Another thing is that you will learn to use the Kubernetes dashboard. It helps to view the statuses of deployments. Also, you will learn to test Kubernetes cluster connectivity in this project.

• Multi-region Disaster Recovery

In this project, you will build a disaster recovery solution using Terraform. This solution will replicate infrastructure resources across many environments in case of any disaster. You will use CloudFront CDN, S3 bucket, and much more.

By practicing this project, you will get deep knowledge of disaster recovery. Also, you will get to know about failover strategies. You will learn to use DynamoDB tables to store the current application state. Besides, it is possible to get practice in handling data on the DynamoDB tables. API gateways play a vital role in managing the tables.

• Deploying Azure Services

In this Terraform project, you will learn to create Terraform templates. The main thing is that you will build the templates in the human-readable format. So, it is easy to configure Azure resources consistently. You will also be conversant with creating Azure app services, resource groups, and Linux app services.

You will learn to configure the cloud environment by working on this project. Also, you will learn to create Terraform plans. Besides, you will practice testing the app deployments and swap two deployment slots.

• Deploying infrastructure with CI/CD

This project will equip you to deploy resources by adding Terraform with CircleCI workflow. So you can deploy resources in the same pipeline in the best manner possible.

Learning this project will familiarize you with CircleCI, GitHub, and the AWS cloud platform. Also, you will learn to analyze CircleCI configuration. You will get to know how to create a remote backend, set up the CircleCI user interface, and more.

• Multi-cloud deployment using Terraform

This project teaches you to deploy applications in several types of clouds. This setup helps to increase fault tolerance. It also provides efficient disaster recovery from cloud provider outages. You will use a single workflow to manage several cloud providers and cross-cloud dependencies.

By doing this project, you will get strong exposure to AWS architecture. Also, you will learn about Terraform resources for AWS. You will learn about virtual machines for microservices deployment and hosting webservers. Moreover, it is possible to become acquainted with RDBMS databases. The databases can be PostgreSQL and MySQL. You will also get to know about auto scalars and load balancers from this project.

Congrats! You have learned the various basic and advanced-level Terraform projects in a detailed way. The projects will help to improve your hard skills remarkably.

Real-time Terraform project ideas

Apart from the above-listed Terraform projects, you can work on the real-time Terraform project ideas below. It will level up your Terraform skills to new heights.

• Terraform digital ocean droplet
• Deploy OpenStack instances
• Terraform recipe for workpress on Fargate
• Cloud-native microservices deployment
• Infra monitoring and alerting
• Mongo Terraform deployment

That’s it! By completing Terraform projects, you can improve your hard skills. It will make you stay ahead in the job market and help you grasp better opportunities quickly.

Summary

• Terraform is typically an Infrastructure-as-a-Code (IaC) tool.
• You can employ Terraform to manage infrastructure in a cloud environment using codes
• Terraform optimizes resource consumption and gears up cloud infrastructure performance
• Terraform projects make you familiar with configuring environments and managing resources.
• You will learn to manage resources in Kubernetes clusters using Terraform

FAQs

1. What is Terraform used for?

Terraform is used for automating infrastructure provisioning and management. It is an open-source and cloud provisioning tool created by HashiCorp. It also supports multi-cloud deployments. Moreover, you can deploy, manage, and orchestrate resources with custom cloud providers.

2. What is IaC?

IaC is the short form of Infrastructure-as-a-Code tool. Terraform is an IaC tool. It replaces manual efforts for IT infrastructure management with the help of codes. In other words, IaC automates infrastructure management. IaC provides quick resource management, disaster recovery, error reduction, and improved security.

3. What is the unique thing about Terraform?

Terraform is cloud-agnostic and supports several cloud providers. Also, it uses the declarative approach, which allows you to construct desired infrastructure. Not just that, Terraform is idempotent. So you can modify resources multiple times without changing the desired results.

4. Can I use Terraform in CI/CD?

Yes, you can use Terraform in CI/CD. It boosts the efficiency of continuous integration and deployment. It also ensures consistent infrastructure deployments.

5. What is HCL in Terraform?

HCL is known as Hashicorp Configuration Language, which is a declarative language. Terraform developers use this language to configure infrastructure resources. This language uses blocks to define resources and modules. HCL offers Terraform developers a clean and readable syntax.

Bottom-line

It's time to wrap! We hope that the Terraform projects included in the blog have been helpful to you. No doubt you can enhance your practical experience by completing the Terraform projects.

If you want to learn more about Terraform and practice the key Terraform projects, don't worry. We will set you a path. You can check out the Terraform course in MindMajix and gain certification. You can enrich your portfolio by adding your sample Terraform projects and certifications. It will help impress interviewers and crack Terraform interviews. Ultimately, you will land your dream job.

What’s more! If you have suggestions, mark your inputs in the comment box below.