ODC Appreciation Day: Terraform

First time I’m taking part of Oracle Development Community Appreciation Day which Tim Hall has created to post about technology you use daily.

My topic will be Terraform which is still fairly new technology for me after having used it only for around a year now. But what a game changer it has been!

I like to talk about how lot of Oracle products are not that cloud-native and if you want to take some benefits from the cloud with your Oracle solution you should find out ways for it. Well if you can’t do it for the actual application go with the infrastructure!

Terraform is an orchestration tool which records the state of your infrastructure. With it you can create, change and remove the infrastructure you have created and deliver whole stack as far as the provider supports by Infrastructure as Code.

Just some months Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) became also an official provider for Terraform. There are providers for all major cloud vendors AWS, GCP, Azure and for several others.

I’ve always liked coding and scripting but running Oracle databases, e-Business Suite and Oracle BI you haven’t had much possibilities for it. Some years ago we started to use Ansible but now when we are using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure I think Terraform is really the way to deploy your infrastructure and then continue with Ansible for example on those components you can’t deploy with Terraform.

If you are starting to migrate some of your workloads to OCI my recommendation is to evaluate use of Infrastructure as Code and start using it right from the start! Sure you will need to put some effort into it when you start but the benefits of versioning and automating your infrastructure come from there.

With OCI provider there are still some shortcomings but Oracle has been very active to improve the provider. Also with Terraform the version 0.12 should be coming out in October which has huge improvements how you can manage everything!

I’ve written a lot of blog posts about OCI and Terraform in the past. Here are some for further reading:

Using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure with Terraform modules

Deep dive into OCI with compartments, users, groups and policies

Create DB system to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure with Terraform

Create multiple instances with one Terraform module in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

OCI block volumes and Terraform

Have a great ODC Appreciation Day!