🚀 Finally Starting with Terraform — A DevOps Perspective

 By Raees Qazi | DevOps Engineer | Learner | Mentor | Creator

Today, I’m excited to share that I’ve finally started working with Terraform — a powerful tool in the DevOps world. But before we dive into Terraform itself, let’s first understand how a typical company runs and how infrastructure plays a key role in its operations.

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🏢 How Does a Company Operate? (Company Hierarchy)

To understand why we need tools like Terraform, we must first understand the hierarchy and flow of work in an IT company:

  1. Business
    Every company runs on business. If the business is doing well, employees get paid, and operations continue smoothly.
  2. Business Analyst
    This team finds clients and identifies opportunities to expand the business.
  3. Solution Architect / Technical Team Lead
    Once a client is onboarded, the architect or team lead designs the actual solution or product.
  4. Procurement
    At this stage, the company arranges the resources:
  • Hiring teams like system/network/storage/backup engineers
  • Buying hardware or renting office/building space

5. Data Center / Cloud
Finally, the solution is deployed either in an on-premises data center or in the cloud.

⚠️ Problems in Traditional Approach

This traditional setup brings a few common problems:

  • Slow Deployment — Everything is manual and time-consuming.
  • High Costs — Hiring multiple engineers increases operational costs.
  • Limited Automation — Most tasks are repetitive and done manually.
  • Human Errors — Manual processes are prone to mistakes.
  • Wasted Resources — When one team is working, others may be idle.
  • Inconsistency — No standard approach; results can vary across environments.

🧠 Enter Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) changes everything. It allows you to write and manage your infrastructure using code, making things:

✅ Faster
✅ Cheaper
✅ More Automated
✅ Consistent
✅ Scalable

🔮 The Future is DevOps — Not Traditional IT Roles

In the future, roles like System Admin and Network Admin may phase out due to automation. It’s the right time to upgrade your skills and move into DevOps.

🌟 Future Job Roles:

  • Infrastructure Specialist
  • Build & Release Engineer
  • Infrastructure Engineer
  • DevOps Engineer

Whatever you’re doing manually today, tomorrow you’ll be doing it via code. That’s where Terraform shines.

🏗️ What is Infrastructure?

In simple terms, infrastructure includes all the services and systems your application needs to run properly.

For example, in AWS:

  • EC2 — Virtual machines
  • S3 — Storage
  • RDS — Databases
  • VPC — Networking

All these components together form your infrastructure.

✅ Provisioning infrastructure = Creating resources like EC2, S3 = Terraform
✅ Configuring infrastructure = Installing software like Docker, Jenkins = Ansible

So remember:

Terraform = Provisioning | Ansible = Configuration

📜 A Short History of Terraform

  • Terraform is a product of HashiCorp.
  • It started as an open-source project, allowing anyone to contribute or create their own version.
  • Later, HashiCorp released Terragrunt with added features.
  • As Terraform’s popularity declined, the developer community started exploring other tools.
  • HashiCorp changed the license of Terraform to BSL (Business Source License):
  • Now you can’t fork, modify, or redistribute it without legal consequences.
  • Before the BSL, the community created OpenTofu, an open-source alternative to Terraform.

💻 How Terraform Works

Terraform uses a language called HCL (HashiCorp Configuration Language) to define infrastructure.

You can install Terraform on Ubuntu using the following commands:

wget -O - https://apt.releases.hashicorp.com/gpg | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/hashicorp-archive-keyring.gpg
echo "deb [arch=$(dpkg --print-architecture) signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/hashicorp-archive-keyring.gpg] \
https://apt.releases.hashicorp.com $(grep -oP '(?<=UBUNTU_CODENAME=).*' /etc/os-release || lsb_release -cs) main" \
| sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hashicorp.listsudo apt update && sudo apt install terraform

To verify installation:

terraform --version

🧩 Final Thoughts

Terraform is not just a tool; it’s a gateway into modern DevOps practices. If you’re currently working as a system admin or network engineer, now is the best time to upgrade your skillset.

We’re living in an era where everything is becoming code, and Terraform helps you control your infrastructure exactly like that — as code.

If you liked this blog, please share the knowledge with others. Let’s grow together in the DevOps journey!

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