We’ve talked about Terraform and Helm. Those surely are cool technologies. But you know what’s even cooler? When you combine both of those. This article will show you how to use Terraform to deploy Helm charts, a very popular practice for our infrastructure in ARCsoft.
Terraform is a very popular technology used both in the industry and within the Research Computing Services (RCS) Team. We at ARC Software have used Terraform to build up STRAP and implemented scripts for Strapper to deploy applications onto STRAP (these apps are called Strapplications). So what is Terraform? What makes it so popular?
A colleague asked for some information on this so I’ll post this here in hopes it might be useful to someone out there (or just me in a year when I vaguely recall doing something similar.) This is a quick description of how I use Terraform to generate Let’s Encrypt certificates using our PowerDNS instance. This is more of a quick reference than anything else.
Up until now, using local storage for Terraform state has served STRAP development well: it’s the simplest to set up and, should you ever need to, it’s easy to pick apart. It’s completely adequate for many uses–if you have local storage, and you don’t need to share the state between multiple editors, then there is no advantage to storing Terraform state remotely. But Strapper doesn’t meet those criteria anymore so we need to go remote.