February 2022 Summaries

Ansible is a powerful automation tool used for managing cloud and on-premises infrastructure. It enables cross-platform automation and orchestration at scale, making it the standard choice among enterprise automation solutions. Ansible uses control and managed nodes concepts, where it connects from the control node to the managed nodes sending commands and instructions to them. The units of code that Ansible executes on the managed nodes are called modules, and an ordered list of tasks together forms a playbook. It leverages YAML language for defining playbooks in a human-readable data format. Some benefits of using Ansible include being free, open-source, easy to start and use, simple deployment workflow without any extra agents, and having extensive official documentation.

In this article, the author explains the use of count and for_each meta-arguments in Terraform. These arguments help manage multiple resources without writing separate blocks of code for each one. The count argument accepts a whole number and creates the specified number of instances of the resource. Each instance has its own infrastructure object associated with it, allowing for individual management. The for_each argument, on the other hand, creates multiple instances of a module or resource block using a map or set of strings. It is useful when resources require different values.

Terraform Locals are named values that can be assigned and used in your code to reduce duplication within the Terraform scripts, thereby increasing readability. They differ from Terraform variables as they have a local scope and their value does not change once assigned. Terraform Locals can be assigned strings, expressions, maps, or even combined with Terraform variables for more dynamic scenarios.