[In-house study group report] We have held an introductory hands-on Terraform!

 

Hello, this is Kita

The spring season is about to pass. (Haii)
This year, many new graduates have joined us, and we are providing training in a friendly atmosphere.
They are also proactive in asking questions, and I feel that they have been able to provide a very fulfilling training session.

Now, this time we held an introductory study session for Terraform, which was requested by our internal members, so we would like to report on it and look back on it.

Introduction

The importance of "Infrastructure as Code (IaC)" is increasingly increasing in the construction and operation of cloud infrastructure.
In this context, we also held an in-house study group called "Introductory Hands-On Hands-On" in order to deepen our understanding of infrastructure automation.

I, too, started using Terraform seriously just a few months ago, and I still study with my superior, Nemi-san , occasionally teaching me.

In this article, we will introduce the background to the study group, the content of the day, the comments of participants, and future initiatives.

Why learn Terraform?

Traditional infrastructure construction is often done manually, and work errors, personalization, and inability to reproduce the issues have been a challenge.
Terraform is a tool that allows you to manage cloud infrastructure configurations with code, and offers the following benefits:

• Improved reproducibility and speed of work
• The infrastructure status can be visualized and versioned as code.
• Eliminating personalization through standardization of procedures

Given this background, Terraform has been a technology that has been attracting attention and used within the company.

We thought that by gaining knowledge from each department regarding infrastructure construction and management, we could contribute to the improvement of technical capabilities of the entire organization, and we used the subject of the study group.

The study group was held in-house and was an offline and online hybrid event.

The teaching materials use a hands-on repository for beginners that I personally created for AWS.
https://github.com/shinkitada/education-terraform

Purpose of the study session

This in-house study session was held for those who have not yet touched Terraform with the following purposes:

• Deepen your understanding of automating infrastructure construction
• Gain basic skills in Terraform
• Improvement of internal technology

by having a sense of purpose and targeting,
we were able to prevent mismatches with what participants wanted.

Hands-on content

In the first half, we explained the basic concepts of IaC and Terraform, including slides and demos.

• Overview of IaC and Terraform
• Explanation and practice of basic operations

The first half was a classroom session, and the second half was a hands-on format, and exercises were conducted to actually build VPCs and EC2 instances.
Many participants were surprised by the experience of being able to easily build and rebuild infrastructure using code through CLI operations.

[Introduction to Terraform Course] Overview of IaC and Terraform

[Introduction to Terraform Course] Basic operation solving and practice

Participant's comments

Non-engineer sales and development engineers also participated, and
after the study session we received the following comments:

• "I thought Terraform would be difficult, but it was fun to actually touch it."
• "I was impressed that the resource was created all at once by applying."
• "It was something I would like to try using in my work."
• "I appreciated the structure being an understanding even if you're not an engineer."

I thought that I could have lowered the conscious hurdle for IaC a little, so I'm glad I tried it.

Future prospects

In the future, we plan to hold various study sessions following this introductory section.

I'll also be blogging them.

Conclusion

Terraform is a tool that has the power to dramatically change the way infrastructure is built.
Through this study session, I realized that by experiencing the concepts and practical skills of IaC, I was able to see that understanding within the company steadily improved.

We hope to continue to create a place where we can share these learning opportunities in the future! !