Hashicorp Terraform Associate Cert Questions

What is Infrastructure as Code? - answer-You write and execute the code to define, deploy, update, and destroy your infrastructure What are the benefits of IaC? - answer-a. Automation -We can bring up the servers with one script and scale up and down based on our load with the same script. b. Reusability of the code - We can reuse the same code c. Versioning - We can check it into version control and we get versioning. Now we can see an incremental history of who changed what, how is our infrastructure actually defined at any given point of time, and we have this transparency of documentation IaC makes changes idempotent, consistent, repeatable, and predictable. How using IaC make it easy to provision infrastructure? - answer-IaC makes it easy to provision and apply infrastructure configurations, saving time. It standardizes workflows across different infrastructure providers (e.g., VMware, AWS, Azure, GCP, etc.) by using a common syntax across all of them. What is Ideompodent in terms of IaC? - answer-The idempotent characteristic provided by IaC tools ensures that, even if the same code is applied multiple times, the result remains the same. What are Day 0 and Day 1 activities? - answer-IaC can be applied throughout the lifecycle, both on the initial build, as well as throughout the life of the infrastructure. Commonly, these are referred to as Day 0 and Day 1 activities. "Day 0" code provisions and configures your initial infrastructure. "Day 1" refers to OS and application configurations you apply after you've initially built your infrastructure. What are the advantages of Terraform? - answer-Platform Agnostic State Management Operator Confidence Where do you describe all the components or your entire datacenter so that Terraform provision those? - answer-Configuration files ends with *.tf How can Terraform build infrastructure so efficiently? - answer-Terraform builds a graph of all your resources, and parallelizes the creation and modification of any non-dependent resources. Because of this, Terraform builds infrastructure as efficiently as possible, and operators get insight into dependencies in their infrastructure. What is multi-cloud deployment? - answer-Provisioning your infrastructure into multiple cloud providers to increase fault-tolerance of your applications. How multi-cloud deployment is useful? - answer-By using only a single region or cloud provider, fault tolerance is limited by the availability of that provider. Having a multi-cloud deployment allows for more graceful recovery of the loss of a region or entire provider. What is cloud-agnostic in terms of provisioning tools? - answer-cloud-agnostic and allows a single configuration to be used to manage multiple providers, and to even handle cross-cloud dependencies. What is the use of terraform being cloud-agnostic? - answer-It simplifies management and orchestration, helping operators build large-scale multi-cloud infrastructures. What is the Terraform State? - answer-Every time you run Terraform, it records information about what infrastructure it created in a Terraform state file. By default, when you run Terraform in the folder /some/folder, Terraform creates the file /some/folder/te. This file contains a custom JSON format that records a mapping from the Terraform resources in your configuration files to the representation of those resources in the real world. What is the purpose of the Terraform State? - answer-Mapping to the Real World - Terraform requires some sort of database to map Terraform config to the real world because you can't find the same functionality in every cloud provider. You need to have some kind of mechanism to be cloud-agnostic Metadata - Terraform must also track metadata such as resource dependencies, pointer to the provider configuration that was most recently used with the resource in situations where multiple aliased providers are present. Performance - When running a terraform plan, Terraform must know the current state of resources in order to effectively determine the changes that it needs to make to reach your desired configuration. For larger infrastructures, querying every resource is too slow. Many cloud providers do not provide APIs to query multiple resources at once, and the round trip time for each resource is hundreds of milliseconds. So, Terraform stores a cache of the attribute values for all resources in the state. This is the most optional feature of Terraform state and is done only as a performance improvement. Syncing - When two people works on the same file and doing some changes to the infrastructure. Its very important for everyone to be working with the same state so that operations will be applied to the same remote objects. What is the name of the terraform state file? - te How do you install terraform on different OS? - answer-// Mac OS brew install terraform // Windows choco install terraform Download zip file mv ~/Downloads/terraform /usr/local/bin/terraform Where do you put terraform configurations so that you can configure some behaviors of Terraform itself? - answer-The special terraform configuration block type is used to configure some behaviors of Terraform itself, such as requiring a minimum Terraform version to apply your configuration. terraform { # ... } Only constants are allowed inside the terraform block. Is this correct? - answer-Yes Within a terraform block, only constant values can be used; arguments may not refer to named objects such as resources, input variables, etc, and may not use any of the Terraform language built-in functions. What are the Providers? - answer-A provider is a plugin that Terraform uses to translate the API interactions with the service. A provider is responsible for understanding API interactions and exposing resources. Because Terraform can interact with any API, you can represent almost any infrastructure type as a resource in Terraform. How do you configure a Provider? - answer-provider "google" { project = "acme-app" region = "us-central1" } The name given in the block header ("google" in this example) is the name of the provider to configure. Terraform associates each resource type with a provider by taking the first word of the resource type name (separated by underscores), and so the "google" provider is assumed to be the provider for the resource type name google_compute_instance. The body of the block (between { and }) contains configuration arguments for the provider itself. Most arguments in this section are specified by the provider itself; in this example both project and region are specific to the google provider. What are the meta-arguments that are defined by Terraform itself and available for all provider blocks? - answer-version: Constraining the allowed provider versions alias: using the same provider with different configurations for different resources What is Provider initialization and why do we need? - answer-Provider initialization is one of the actions of terraform init. Each time a new provider is added to configuration -- either explicitly via a provider block or by adding a resource from that provider -- Terraform must initialize the provider before it can be used. Initialization downloads and installs the provider's plugin so that it can later be executed. When you run terraform init command, all the providers are installed in the current working directory. (True/False) - answer-Providers downloaded by terraform init are only installed for the current working directory; other working directories can have their own installed provider versions. Note that terraform init cannot automatically download providers that are not distributed by HashiCorp. How do you constrain the provider version? - answer-To constrain the provider version as suggested, add a required_providers block inside a terraform block: terraform { required_providers { aws = "~ 1.0" } } How do you upgrade to the latest acceptable version of the provider? - answer-terraform init --upgrade It upgrade to the latest acceptable version of each providerThis command also upgrades to the latest versions of all Terraform modules. How many ways you can configure provider versions? - answer-1. With required_providers blocks under terraform block. terraform { required_providers { aws = "~ 1.0" } } 2. Provider version constraints can also be specified using a version argument within a provider block provider { version= "1.0" } How do you configure Multiple Provider Instances? - answer-alias You can optionally define multiple configurations for the same provider, and select which one to use on a per-resource or per-module basis. Why do we need Multiple Provider instances? - answer-Some of the example scenarios: a. multiple regions for a cloud platform b. targeting multiple Docker hosts c. multiple Consul hosts, etc. How do we define multiple Provider configurations? - answer-To include multiple configura