Day Seven, What now? (see project overview)
The Pluralsight “Terraform – Getting Started” course by Ned Bellavance gave a really good overview of Terraform complete with usable examples for starting. My goal is to get a portfolio site for myself up and running in AWS. I could go deeper into Terraform. For sure one course does not make me an expert. But, I’m not aiming to be an expert, just yet, so I think I’ll move on to the things I need to get something out there. I want to use best practices as much as makes sense but I found myself already glossing over the info in the last two modules of the Getting Started course because it introduced a dependency on Azure, which I’m not ready for.
So, next, I’ll look into Vault, Puppet and CI/CD. (No, not really)
About 30 seconds after typing the last sentence, I found this: , which reminded me that I’m going to use Docker.
The last place I worked, the lead programmer had already set up the infrastructure. I didn’t get into any of it very deeply, but now that I’m researching this info myself, I’m understanding that he made some good decisions (sorry I didn’t really notice earlier, Donnie!).
According to this article, if you choose to use Docker, it will take care of your provisioning needs. So, that’s what I’m going to do.
But first. What about passwords,etc.? Here is a good article with practical guidance.
Reading this got me to the point of making a decide regarding passwords. I’ll use AWS Secrets Manager. I’ve used it before. It’s easy to use and Terraform can get secrets from it no problem. I have used Secrets manager from Python code. To avoid the possibility of getting charged for secret access, I cached the secrets so they only had to be obtained once per deploy (or machine start).
I could go down side-roads all day long…
Next up Pluralsight-wise “Docker and Kubernetes: The Big Picture” By Nigel Poulton. This is truly an overview course, but Nigel just sold me on Kubernetes. I’m not sure if that replaces Terraform or what. I’m afraid it does. Maybe that’s good, I don’t know. Another question mark step.
Still not convinced on environment variables, apparently!
As I look back at this and see that I’ve still not bought into environment variables entirely, I’m wondering when I found this Twelve Factor information. Its pretty clear and pretty authoritative and when I found it, I couldn’t believe I’d never seen it before. Head in the sand.
Spoiler, alert…I discover Twelve Factor info tomorrow. That took awhile!