Our motto here at PacketFabric is “Automate everything, all the time.” We’re super excited to announce the official release of the PacketFabric Terraform provider, which offers even greater control of your network services.
Through the magic of Infrastructure as Code, anyone can use the PacketFabric Terraform provider to easily automate provisioning and management of PacketFabric infrastructure, reducing your deployment costs, opportunity for human mistake, and allowing you to get to market faster than ever before.
Our first version of the PacketFabric Terraform provider supports our Cloud Router product and connectivity to AWS, with more services and providers to follow in future updates.
What is Terraform, Anyway?
Terraform by HashiCorp is a popular open-source infrastructure as code tool that allows teams to manage infrastructure resources the same way software engineers manage code. Many DevOps, SRE, and general IT teams use Terraform today to greatly simplify deploying and managing infrastructure services, such as compute and storage, or private network connectivity.
How does Terraform work?
Users define infrastructure with HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) or JSON. Once infrastructure has been defined, Terraform can manage resources such as public and private cloud infrastructure, network resources, software as a service, and platform as a service with Terraform “providers”.
The “provider” is how Terraform communicates with infrastructure and resource provider APIs, such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and now: PacketFabric.
Basically, with PacketFabric’s Terraform provider, you start by using HCL or JSON to declare what a specific instance of PacketFabric infrastructure looks like (say, a 10Gbps cloud connection to AWS) and then automatically set up and manage new instances you’ve defined using the PacketFabric Terraform provider.
What You Can Do with PacketFabric’s Terraform Provider
At a high level, PacketFabric Terraform Provider allows you to create, manage, and update PacketFabric services through the PacketFabric API using Terraform tools. You can create and manage Ports, Virtual Connections, Point to Point Connections, Hosted and Dedicated Cloud, and Cloud Routers.
A few real life scenarios for using PacketFabric Terraform provider:
PacketFabric Terraform provider offers DevOps and SRE teams a native, intuitive way to deploy and use PacketFabric services. Through the magic of automation, technical teams can completely automate the creation and deployment of PacketFabric Cloud Routers that connect to AWS, by using both PacketFabric’s Terraform provider and AWS’ Terraform provider.
By integrating with a familiar tool and providing an even higher degree of automation to our customers, we’re further reducing the cost and time spent deploying and managing networks.
Our Terraform Provider makes it simple to manage your network infrastructure just like your cloud infrastructure, with no need to log into a portal to manage your services.
Get Started with PacketFabric’s Terraform provider
Here’s a few resource links to help you get started:
PacketFabric Terraform provider on Github
Use Case: PacketFabric Cloud Router with AWS
PacketFabric Terraform provider documentation
PacketFabric Terraform registry
Learn More
Already familiar with Terraform and want to see how you can add network infrastructure to the mix? Check out our services, request a demo or just register an account and get started today.