May 22nd, 2024 - Meetup Event - Terraform/Tofu Workshop

[mbuchoff]

Organize Long Form Event

User Story

As an organizer of the Orlando DevOps Community Group, I would like to have organized, scheduled, and posted the Meetup Event on May 22nd, 2024 in Credo (still need to confirm) so that we can start to move the monthly lean coffee / beer events around.

Synopsis

Bring your laptops and be ready to go through some exercises together. We'll use OpenTofu to provision some resources onto a Cloud provider and upload simple web service onto it. My familiarity is .NET Core/Azure, but if anyone wants to go a different direction (ie NodeJS/AWS), we can also do that.

Tasks

• [x] Write up the Synopsis
• [x] Confirm the location, Slack request for Credo
• [x] Create the Event in Meetup. Meetup Event Link
• [x] Have Mike Butler post in EventBrite - posted
• [x] Promote on LinkedIn - posted
• [x] Publish on ODevs Slack #Meetup - posted
• [x] Add a reminder to personal calendar to ping frequently (weekly) in the comments section
  • Encourage everyone to have done the following steps ahead of time:
  • Set up your private azure environment
  • install azure cli
  • Confirm that az account show shows a valid Azure account
• [x] Gather and Bring Materials
• [ ] Create Slide Deck
  • Why do we need IaC? Give a detailed example of getting lost in the complexity without it.
  • Difference between IaC tools
  • Provisioning
    • Terraform/OpenTofu (functional)
    • Pulomi (imperative)
    • Cloudformations (functional)
    • VRO/VRA
  • Configuration Management
    • Ansible
    • Puppet
    • Chef
  • Resources
  • https://www.linode.com/docs/guides/terraform-vs-pulumi/
  • https://www.linode.com/docs/guides/introduction-to-infrastructure-as-code/
  • https://blog.xmi.fr/posts/terraform-vs-bicep/
• [ ] Create Follow Up Survey

Extra Notes

• [x] Rebrand this.
  • From @snohio :

    Hey, the Feb 28th and May 22nd events can be a IaC Series. I'm going to dive more into the platform standards and configuring OS and Application standards. The Terraform event is more IaC from the provisioning side. ... We should really break it into a few. But we're already here.. 1) Building your image (with Packer or else) 2) Deploying your Infrastructure with Code (Terraform) 3) Updating and Enforcing your Policies (Chef Infra) 4) Reporting and Validating your Configuration (Chef Inspec) And how all of those incorporate security. It doesn't just live at the Edge, it is in every part of that.

• Common pattern: Infrastructure first, Terraform second.
  • Set up an ad-hoc scenario by hand with some complexity (so that the need for Terraform might be obvious), then show how to migrate
  • Consider Terify (winget install aztfexport or brew install aztfexport)
  • Takes a long time (TODO: time it)
  • Doesn't catch all resources (ie when I tested, it imported all keyvaults, but missed some, but not all secrets within them)
  • If you make the mistake of importing everything, you will have lots of garbage you have to mindfully remove a lot of the extras the come by default, ie security policies, hostnames, audits, etc)
• Step 1: local state. Step 2: remote state
• Don't forget drift detection
• Example project with tofu

[snohio]

Updated the title and description to the new date of May 22nd. I updated the Meetup event to 6:30 rather than 7:00, primarily because you have this as a 3 hour event. People are going to want to leave by 9:30, I feel. Adjust if that is going to be too early to start presenting.

[snohio]

@mbuchoff - were you going to present? Is this the one that @mdaverde is going to present a general overview of Terraform / OpenTOFU? I would suggest to have at least a 30 minute presentation on what Terraform / OpenTOFU is.

[mbuchoff]

@snohio, for a presentation, I was thinking maybe a quick overview of the problem Tofu solves (ie paint a picture why use IAC at all) and a short demo of using it. If @mdaverde wants to present instead, I'm good with that.

Also, 6:30 sounds good to me instead of 7. I agree, 9:30 on a worknight will be late enough.

[mdaverde]

Not sure I agreed to this full talk but I am willing to help out

[mbuchoff]

@mdaverde, I don't think you did either, but wasn't sure if I missed (or misinterpreted) a conversation. Please don't feel like you have any commitments around this event.

[snohio]

Include in the presentation the difference between IaC being Terraform/OpenTofu, Cloudformations, VRO/VRA (THIS IS PROVISIONING) and IAC as Ansible, Puppet, Chef (THIS IS CONFIGURATION).

[mbuchoff]

@snohio, can you post the Tofu event in EventBrite when you have a chance?

[mbuchoff]

@paulo-desouza, can you post this in LinkedIn?

EDIT: @paulo-desouza, can you also post it on here in Slack?