Terraform for Enterprise Projects

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A template for complex Terraform projects Writing Terraform code is easy, but using it can be tricky.

That's how I would sum up my experience with Terraform after using it professionally for three years. To be honest, writing good Terraform code can be difficult, but the bigger challenge, in my opinion, is organizing the code so that it is clean, accessible, and maintainable.

This is especially true for so-called enterprise projects. These are large projects that span multiple accounts, regions, services, and even clouds. Such projects quickly become large and complex. In the enterprise context, it is important to think carefully about the structure of your Terraform project.


Infrastructure-as-code projects can quickly become complex to manage, Source: Unsplash.com

In this blog post, I want to describe some experiences I have indonesia consumer email list gained in several enterprise projects. Below, I present a Terraform project structure that has proven to be a good starting point for organizing code and configuration files. This is intended to provide guidance for developers who want to professionalize their Terraform code, especially those who are just discovering Infrastructure as Code.

A structuring option for Terraform projects
modules
The first step to developing clean, accessible, and maintainable Terraform projects is to use modules.

Modules are reusable configurations of Terraform code. These modules form units of infrastructure, such as servers, databases, or managed services. To make the best use of them, modules should be as general as possible. Modules often correspond to a specific service, such as GCP BigQuery or Azure SQL Server.

In our example repository, there is a folder called modules that is divided by cloud providers - in our case, azure and gcp. In these subfolders, you will find the generic Terraform modules for each provider.


A tree diagram of the module folder

Each module consists of exactly three files: main.tf, variables.tf and outputs.tf. I recommend sticking to this convention even if, for example, your module has no outputs. In this case, just add an empty file.

Modules are important because they help break down our infrastructure configuration into standardized building blocks that we can reuse across different projects or implementations. They can also greatly simplify the complex task of building infrastructure. Whether you're building modules for your own team or for others, you can tailor them to the exact needs of the module users.