Ever had to SSH into a production server to manually copy over files, or to run a command? Palms sweaty and shaking. You don’t know what the outcome of the update will be, and if something goes wrong the system could go down? If you haven’t, you’re one of the lucky ones!

Making manual changes onto an existing server means you’re likely operating with “mutable infrastructure” — whether you know it or not. But, there is another way. And that’s immutable infrastructure. And today we’re discussing exactly that, what immutable infrastructure is, the benefits and the tools you can use to implement it.

By the end of this article you’ll have a clear understanding of what immutable infrastructure is and why it’s important, the pro’s, con’s and trade offs.

When everyone keeps talking about Infrastructure As Code you might feel stuck and frustrated because a lot of your cloud infrastructure was created manually. Infrastructure As Code feels like a million miles away for you…

With Terraform it’s possible to bring existing infrastructure under code management in a safe, and incremental way. And today we’re going to go through the three steps you’ll need to take if you want to apply Terraform Infrastructure As Code to your existing infrastructure.

By the end of this article you’ll understand the 3 steps to get started with Terraform Infrastructure As Code on existing infrastructure. 

Ever wanted to learn Kubernetes? Serverless? Write some Microservices in AWS or GCP? Awesome… But don’t. Or at least, not yet. Why? Because the first thing you should learn is Terraform. Don’t touch Serverless. Definitely don’t touch Kubernetes, and I’d probably not even bother creating an AWS S3 bucket.

There are many reasons for you to be excited to learn Cloud Engineering as a whole. But no other decision impacted my ability to learn Cloud Engineering than: first learning Infrastructure As Code. In hindsight, I wish I did it sooner.

In todays article I’ll try (and hopefully successfully) to convince you why Infrastructure As Code is the most logical starting point for learning Cloud Engineering concepts and tools.

By the end of the article you’ll know what Infrastructure As Code (with Terraform) is and I’ll give you 5 reasons why Terraform should be your starting skill when learning Cloud Engineering. 

If you’re new to Terraform, you might have started experimenting creating resources. Before long it’s likely that all your Terraform files are inside one large file, or even many large files.

After a certain amount of time this process will start to break down and become hard to maintain. And that’s where Terraform modules come in.

By the end of this article you’ll understand the basics of Terraform modules, and know how to break down large Terraform files into modules. 

Not all infrastructure as code is born equal. Some styles of infrastructure as code give us great benefits — whereas other kinds can cause a lot of headache.

Writing good infrastructure as code doesn’t mean simply bundling code that creates infrastructure into a repository and walking away. Knowing the in declarative vs. imperative infrastructure as code can mean the difference between having an easy life or a total nightmare.

By the end of this article you’ll know what the difference is between declarative and imperative infrastructure as code, why it matters and when you should use each. 

Terraform is a really useful tool when it comes to learning cloud engineering. In my opinion Terraform will become as ubiquitous for infrastructure provisioning as tools like git are for version control.

Today we’re going to talk about the 6 key fundamentals topics you need to know in order to get working with Terraform quickly. We won’t be covering the concepts in great depth (a good thing!) but we’ll just enough so that you’re aware of what the concept is and how it works before you go diving deep.

By the end of this article you’ll be aware of the 6 key concepts of Terraform, everything from the language to how to structure your files.