Introduction to Terraform Cloud

Last week, in Seattle I was attending an annual conference organized by HashiCorp. This year during HashiConf 2019, a new Terraform Cloud has been announced. What does it mean from your perspective? Of course, it depends on what is your current professional position, but if you are a part of a small team, let’s say, up to 5 infrastructure developers, it is the right time to learn more about Terraform Cloud, especially Terraform Cloud Free Tier.
I am more than sure that during the last few years you have installed terraform by yourself on VM in your DataCenter, your own computer or even in the cloud. Of course, it had been not very complicated, but since that moment problems have started to arise as you wanted to collaborate on the code with someone else. To make the story short the most complicated topic was your Terraform state file. How to exchange that state file securely with someone else, especially when your teammates are located in a different physical location. How to do it without risk of inconsistency? Yet another question is related to code itself. How to track and control versions of HCL code? Of course, the local git server can be an option, but the ultimate question is how to integrate all of that with some CD/CI pipeline to streamline infra provisioning in a secure way.
All of these questions seem to be answered in Terraform Cloud. One more thing – for up to 5 developers it will be for free! Awesome, isn’t it?
This blog post is just an introduction. My plan here is to write a series of blog posts about Terraform Cloud features which include Remote State Storage (for state files), support for Organisations, Workspaces, Teams, and Users. Next, I will write about the remote plan and apply workflow plus a couple of details regarding the Private Modules Repository. For your information, all of that will be integrated with GitHub repositories which give us real Version Control Services (VCS) capability in Terraform Cloud.
Martin.
PS. Just a few days ago HashiCorp has published videos from the HashiConf2019. Here you can watch keynote by Armon Dadgar about Terraform Cloud.