Harrison 
The cloud is rapidly becoming a central part of modern business. From online marketplaces to streaming platforms, businesses of all sizes rely on cloud-based infrastructure to deliver the seamless experiences their customers expect. As a result, the ability to effectively manage this infrastructure has become essential for any organization. This is where infrastructure-as-code comes into play.
What is Infrastructure as Code?
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is the process of using code to manage your infrastructure instead of manually configuring servers and resources. This approach enables operations teams and developers to version, test, and deploy infrastructure changes quickly and accurately. Infrastructure as code is growing in popularity as more and more companies move to the cloud.
What is Terra Grant?
Terragrunt is an open source IaC tool that simplifies the process of managing infrastructure on cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. It is a thin wrapper around Terraform that provides additional tools for managing complex infrastructure stacks with multiple dependencies and environments. Terragrunt allows you to define your infrastructure as code in a concise, maintainable, and reusable way while keeping your codebase organized.
Why use Terragrunt?
Terragrunt offers several benefits for teams managing infrastructure on cloud platforms. Some of the main benefits are listed below.
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Simplified configuration management: Terragrunt allows you to organize your code in a modular manner, simplifying the management of complex infrastructure. You can define reusable modules for different parts of your infrastructure and reuse them across multiple environments and projects.
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Better collaboration: Terragrunt makes it easy for teams to collaborate on infrastructure code by providing a shared set of best practices and standards. This helps reduce the risk of errors and misconfigurations.
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Version control improvements: Terragrunt enhances version control of your infrastructure code by allowing you to manage your codebase using Git. You can roll back changes and track changes to your infrastructure over time.
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Enhanced security: Terragrunt allows you to define security policies for your infrastructure as code. This ensures consistency of security policies across all environments and projects, reducing the risk of security breaches and data loss.
How does Terragrunt work?
Terragrunt uses the same declarative language as Terraform, so you don’t need to learn a new language or syntax.
With Terragrunt, you define your infrastructure code in a hierarchy of folders and files. Each folder represents a module, and a module can contain one or more Terraform configuration files. Terragrunt uses these modules to create a dependency graph for your infrastructure. This graph helps Terragrunt manage the order in which resources are created, updated, or destroyed.
Terragrunt also offers several features that simplify the management of your infrastructure stack. For example, you can use Terragrunt to manage state files that Terraform uses to track the state of your resources. Terragrunt can store these state files in his remote backends such as AWS S3 or Google Cloud Storage, making it easier to manage state across multiple environments and projects.
Is Terragrunt free?
Yes, Terragrunt is an open source tool and is available for free. The latest version of Terragrunt can be downloaded from the official GitHub repository. Terragrunt is compatible with all major cloud providers including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.
Should I consider using Terragrunt?
Infrastructure as code is becoming a must-have for managing modern cloud-based infrastructure. Terragrunt provides a powerful and flexible toolset for managing your infrastructure stack using Terraform. Terragrunt helps teams manage complex infrastructure stacks on cloud platforms by simplifying configuration management, improving collaboration, and strengthening security. If you want to simplify your infrastructure management process, Terragrunt may be worth considering.
How can I learn more about using Terragrunt in the cloud?
If you want to learn more about how to use Terragrunt to manage your cloud-based infrastructure, check out my course Introduction to Terragrunt for the Cloud. In it, you’ll learn how to use Terragrunt to simplify and streamline your Terraform code, how Terragrunt automates infrastructure deployment, and how Terragrunt can help you manage infrastructure as code.
