Tech Learning Collective

Technology education for radical organizers and revolutionary communities.

The Genesis Project: Making and Maintaining Cloud Infrastructure with Terraform

Poster for The Genesis Project: Making and Maintaining Cloud Infrastructure with Terraform

Build an infrastructure automatically and from scratch using Terraform, a free and open source tool that turns code into virtual machines, firewall rulesets, DNS records, and other computing resources. Automating the deployment of digital resources makes it easier to grow networks, fix issues, and perform basic maintenance, all of which means a smaller team can do more with less. This workshop introduces you to basic Infrastructure as Code principles so that you can understand how to make the most of “the cloud.”

Attend the next workshop(s).

Detailed description

In the beginning, there was the mainframe: a single, gigantic machine that held all the data and did all the work by itself, like a digital planet suspended in the vast emptiness of cyberspace. Then came networks, the personal computer, the Internet, Web 2.0, cloud computing, microservices, and containers—a whole cybergalaxy to explore. While the world today looks very different than it did in the days of the mainframe, every project still needs to start at the beginning: get at least one computer to hold all project data and do all project work. So how do modern projects go from a single computer to a whole galaxy so quickly?

For many (including Tech Learning Collective!), the answer is Terraform, a free, open source, and extensible tool that can provision and manage any number of infrastructural resources from source code repositories to cloud compute instances to DNS records and much, much more. Using Terraform, engineers describe the digital environment they’d like to have by writing it down in a simple, declarative configuration language called HCL. Then, when instructed, Terraform does the work of metaphorically, well, terraforming cyberspace to match the engineer’s description.

In this workshop, you’ll learn the basics of how to set up Terraform for your organization. We’ll also go over best practices for ensuring testing, staging, and production infrastructures stay isolated from one another, how to compose reusable modules, and how to share your Terraform configurations as well as project state with collaborators. At the end of this workshop, you’ll understand how to bring the cloud down to earth.

Upcoming “The Genesis Project: Making and Maintaining Cloud Infrastructure with Terraform” Events

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