In this chapter, we introduce a foundational concept in infrastructure-as-code: Terraform Environment Configuration. This approach enables teams to define and manage multiple infrastructure environments—such as development and production—using consistent, scalable practices.
Modern software applications are rarely deployed in a single environment. Instead, they typically require multiple stages for development, testing, and production. For example:
Each of these environments necessitates a different infrastructure footprint. While the logical architecture may be similar, the scale and configuration often differ. Managing these differences manually or duplicating code is error-prone and inefficient.
This is where Terraform Environment Configuration becomes essential. It enables teams to define reusable infrastructure templates ("blueprints") that are tailored to each environment's requirements.
In this project, environment-specific Terraform configurations serve as master blueprints. These blueprints define the complete AWS infrastructure for each environment, including components such as:
These blueprints are organized in a directory structure with environment-specific folders (e.g., environments/dev, environments/prod). Each folder contains the necessary Terraform configuration files for that particular environment.
Within each environment folder, several key Terraform files define the infrastructure setup:
*variables.tf**: Declares the input variables required to provision the infrastructure. Think of it as the recipe’s ingredient list.*terraform.tfvars**: Provides concrete values for those variables specific to the current environment. For instance, production may specify a different AWS region or larger node sizes than development.*main.tf**: The core configuration file that invokes reusable Terraform modules, using the variables defined earlier.*provider.tf**: Specifies the cloud provider (e.g., AWS) and credentials or authentication methods used to interact with the platform.