Terraform Integration
Multi-cloud is the
dominating IT strategy most welcomed and implemented by tech-savvy
organizations. Organizations are turning to a mix of cloud providers
rather than simply cloud types, one cloud provider for security, a
mix of solutions for legacy and new applications, and one for dev and
testing, etc. With a Multi-cloud strategy, organizations use a mix of
infrastructure as a service, or IaaS, offerings, such as those from
Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services, and share workloads between
them. Multi-cloud strategy achieves goals such as Optimized ROI,
Superior Security, Low Latency, Autonomy, and Business continuity.
Multi-cloud, along with
all benefits, also brings a huge challenge to the organizations. Who
will be the single point of responsibility for operating,
orchestrating, and optimizing the organization’s infrastructure
across multiple cloud providers? Multi-cloud management is essential
to any organization that is planning to move to a Multi-cloud
solution or already migrated to it.
TCPWave IPAM provides a
multi-cloud management solution to manage diversified cloud providers
such as AWS, Google, Azure, Dyn DNS, Akamai, and Verisign. TCPWave
IPAM offers a multi-cloud management solution in different ways. It
offers Rest API solution to integrate with existing legacy solution,
IPAM Rich User Interface, and TCPWave IPAM Terraform Plugin.
Terraform is used to
create, manage, and manipulate infrastructure resources. Examples of
resources include physical machines, VMs, network switches,
containers, etc. Almost any infrastructure noun can be represented as
a resource in Terraform.
Terraform is agnostic to
the underlying platforms by supporting providers. A Terraform
provider is responsible for understanding API interactions and
exposing resources. Providers generally are IaaS (e.g. AWS, GCP,
Microsoft Azure, OpenStack), PaaS (e.g. Heroku), or SaaS services
(e.g. Terraform Enterprise, DNSimple, CloudFlare).
Terraform uses text files
to describe infrastructure and to set variables. These text files are
called Terraform configurations and end in .tf.
TCPWave IPAM Terraform
plugin is a convenient approach for the users who wants to manage
multi-cloud infrastructure as code using a single template. Create
next available VPC with given DHCP Option set in the cloud, create
next available Subnet in the given VPC in the cloud, manage DNS
across multiple cloud providers with single cloud provider template
associated to different cloud providers and scale up/down virtual
machines in cloud with predefined cloud instance provisioning
templates and propagate the resource records of the newly added
virtual machine into multi-cloud immediately as atomic operation in
are few of many features that uniquely distinguish TCPWave IPAM
multi-cloud management solution from other solutions. It also offers
the flexibility to manage infrastructure from IPAM UI once the
infrastructure is created using the TCPWave IPAM Terraform plugin.
Scenario
If your web application
is a multi-tier application with webserver and database server. You
know the time interval in which the application receives peak load
and the time interval when the load is minimum. If you cannot scale
up, your application is likely to cripple under the load. If you
cannot scale down under minimum load, costs will not be optimized.
Solution
- Create different cloud
providers in TCPWave IPAM. Cloud provider in TCPWave IPAM
encapsulates the credentials to connect to the cloud.
- Create cloud instance
provisioning templates for different cloud providers. These templates
consist of options to create virtual machines in cloud.
- Create single TCPWave
IPAM Terraform Template with n number of TCPWave IPAM object
resources. Each resource creates a virtual machine in the cloud
according to cloud instance provisioning template specified in the
resource, creates resource record in DNS and creates object in IPAM.
- Create other TCPWave IPAM
Terraform Template from copy of the first template and delete
resources that are not needed in minimum load time interval.
- Associate first template
to be executed just before the peak load time starts to scale up
servers and execute second template to be executed just before the
minimum load time starts to scale down servers, to the automated
process which manages your infrastructure. Command to execute
Terraform template is simply terraform apply.
Business Advantage
By using TCPWave IPAM terraform provider, user can leverage the
capability to manage VPCs, Subnets, VMs and Resource records from
IPAM after infrastructure is created using Terraform. Single
terraform template can manage multiple cloud providers.