A fantastic feature of Terraform is that the code is simply a set of files in a directory with the *.tf extension (or the *.tf.json extension). It doesn't include subdirectories and we would call this our "working directory" when we're using our code editor or we're in the shell. We can check the directory with … Continue reading Terraform Best Practices: Files
I want to start capturing some best practices with the intent of keeping them simple and slowly building them up in the coming weeks. I get to observe so many people learn Terraform and I see patterns emerge as better understanding occurs. How I get to observe people learn Terraform: My primary role at CDW … Continue reading Terraform Best Practices: Do Not Hard Code Values
I work with developing people. I do this as part of my day job where I develop future consultants to attain technical mastery and working with their customers. I do this as an adjunct at a community college. I do this for myself. I do take a relatively hands-off approach with my children; I had … Continue reading Education is the Matrix
I have been interested in energy efficiency since I was very young. Learning about physics and improving systems is just ingrained in my mind. A very popular idea starting about 20 years ago was the concept of using an on-demand tankless water heater rather than heating water to temperature and storing it for later use. … Continue reading The Problem with On-Demand Heating and Cooling
Running self-hosted agents for Terraform Cloud is a great option for facilitating access to privately hosted API endpoints. To perform a test in Terraform Cloud, an agent pool can be created and an agent token generated to register the agent with Terraform Cloud. However, the agent software is only built for Linux on the x86_64 … Continue reading Terraform Cloud Agent on Apple Silicon
I picked this up while I was attending Hashiconf 2023 in San Francisco from Total Wine for about $32. This was the 2nd local whiskey that I tried, the other being Treecraft American Whiskey; I didn't take any notes on it, but it was a decent pour. Also, the Marquis Marriott in San Francisco has … Continue reading Redwood Empire Emerald Giant Rye Whiskey
Governance with respect to cloud providers has become a rather mature set of principles. Much of this began with the adoption of SaaS solutions, like Office 365; in particular, Microsoft Teams. The necessity for governance emerged when it was identified that we have consistently repeated the same playbook leading to negative consequences. Many of our … Continue reading Governance in Infrastructure as Code
Testing Terraform code has always been a challenge. Several testing suites had been used, but they always required knowledge of a different language and that is anti-pattern for software testing; tests should always be written in the same language as the code that you're testing. Existing testing suites: terratest from Gruntwork with tests written in … Continue reading Terraform Testing Preview
I have always had a mind towards energy independence, or just general concepts of independence. I would rather do something myself if I have the time learn and it isn't absurdly inexpensive to just pay for something. Things around energy have been highly politicized. It also seems that as part of this politicization that people … Continue reading Thoughts on Energy Independence
Recently, I have been diving into the internals of Terraform and some of the providers as I look at terraform-policymaker, as it only makes empty policy definitions and it may be an issue with the significant revisions on the AWS provider since its last update. This means, while becoming more familiar with Go, it is … Continue reading Insertion Sort in Go
Dustin Dortch 