A couple of years ago, I blogged about my prototype of StackMate, a tool and a service that interprets AWS CloudFormation-style templates and creates CloudStack resources. The idea was to provide an application management solution. I didn’t develop the idea beyond a working prototype. Terraform from Hashicorp is a similar idea, but with the ability to add extensions (providers) to drive resource creation in different clouds and service providers. Fortunately Terraform is solid and widely used. Even better, Sander van Harmelen (@_svanharmelen_) has written a well-documented CloudStack provider.
Terraform templates have a different (but json-style) syntax than AWS Cloudformation, which among other things lets you add comments. Like StackMate, it figures out the order of resource creation by creating a dependency graph. You can also add explicity “depends_on” relationships. I played around with Terraform and created a couple of templates here:
https://github.com/chiradeep/terraform-cloudstack-examples
One template creates a VPC and 2 subnets and 2 VMS. The other template creates 2 isolated networks and a couple of VMs (one with nics on both networks).
Pull requests accepted.
While there are awesome services and products out there that can do similar things (RightScale, Scalr, Citrix Lifecycle Management), it is great to see something open sourced and community-driven.
