Experimenting Locally with Terraform

Question

We are looking into Terraform as a way of managing our infrastructure and it looks very interesting.

However, currently our corporate proxy/firewall is causing terraform apply to fail due to security restrictions.

While we wait for these network issues to be resolved, is there any way that I can experiment with Terraform locally without needing to connect to Azure or AWS? Perhaps with VirtualBox?

Answer 1

Terraform supports a bunch of providers, but the vast majority of them are public cloud based.

However, you could set up a local VMware vSphere cluster and use the vSphere provider to interact with that to get you going. There's also a provider for OpenStack if you want to set up an OpenStack cluster.

Alternatively you could try using something like HPE's Eucalyptus which provides API compatibility with AWS, but on-premises.

That said, unless you already have a datacenter running VMware, all of those options are pretty awful and will take a lot of effort to get setup so you may be best waiting for your firewall to be opened up instead.

There isn't unfortunately a nice frictionless first party implementation of a VirtualBox provider but you could try this third-party VirtualBox provider.

Answer 2

One way to get used to a few things that Terraform is great at (dependency management, data driven configuration, resource lifecycle, etc.) is to use the null_resource provisioner on your workstation. This assumes that you have enough control over your workstation to get Terraform on it (this is pretty difficult at a lot of places that have high security needs).

By just using Terraform's null_resource provisioner you can get used to a lot of the things you'll use with a cloud. If you have the ability to install Docker on your workstation, you can go really far to acting like a cloud because Docker supports swarm mode on a workstation.

For example,

resource "null_resource" "docker_swarm" {      provisioner "local-exec" {       command = "docker swarm init"     }      provisioner "local-exec" {       command = <<EOF         docker swarm leave --force          # Careful here. This assumes you want a clean Docker slate,         # remove all Docker volumes from your machine.         docker volume rm -f $(docker volume ls -q)  EOF       when = "destroy"     } }  resource "null_resource" "start_stack" {      provisioner "local-exec" {       command = "docker stack deploy -c ./docker-stack.yml demostack"     }      provisioner "local-exec" {       command = "docker stack rm demostack"       when = "destroy"     }      depends_on = ["null_resource.docker_swarm"] } 

In that simple example above you see how you'd manage lifecycle. And here's the cool part: that's exactly how you'd start up a supported Docker Swarm in AWS, Azure, etc., though it'll be a bit more complicated and take a bit longer.

If you don't have Docker, I'm sure you can think of some other create/destroy lifecycle you may have on your workstation.

Good luck! IMHO Terraform is one of the most profound things to come across our keyboards (Docker ranks there too).