When you are building your cloud infrastructure, you can think of it as code. Infrastructure as code means that the virtual machines, networking, and storage can all be thought of as code. On Azure, you can build your infrastructure using Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates and deploy using PowerShell. You could also use PowerShell or Azure CLI to express your infrastructure. Many enterprises use Terraform, an open source infrastructure as code provider by HashiCorp, to build, change, version cloud infrastructure.

You can use Terraform across multiple platforms, including Amazon Web Services, IBM Cloud (formerly Bluemix), Google Cloud Platform, DigitalOcean, Linode, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, OVH, Scaleway VMware vSphere or Open Telekom Cloud, OpenNebula and OpenStack. In this article, we’ll explore Azure. At a high level, you write the configuration of your infrastructure in Terraform files that can describe the infrastructure of a single application or of your entire data center, and then apply it to the target cloud (in this case Azure).

In this article, you install Terraform and configure it, create the Terraform configuration plans for two resource groups an AKS cluster and Azure Log Analytics workspace, and apply the plans into Azure. Continue reading “Walkthrough: Create Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) using Terraform”