This month, Alkira achieved a giant milestone by releasing Terraform Provider Version: 1.0. This key release embodies stability, robustness, and completeness that signals readiness for the most demanding production use-cases. Besides overall provider maturity, why is this release important?
Provisioning Enhancements
To provide the ultimate flexibility for our customers, Alkira now offers two methods of execution when building infrastructure using Terraform.
Method 1 – Provisioning via Portal
The first method allows you to complete the standard init, plan, and apply process with Terraform, and all the infrastructure will be staged for review in Alkira’s Cloud Services Exchange® (Alkira CSX) Portal. From here, practitioners have the flexibility to review and mark specific changes for provisioning. Once everything is confirmed, a simple click of the Provision button will deploy the infrastructure.
Method 2 – Provisioning at Terraform Runtime
The second method follows the same init, plan, and apply process with Terraform and provisions the infrastructure at runtime. This matches Terraform’s standard behavior. To provision infrastructure at runtime, you can simply add provision = true inside the Alkira provider block.
Why is this Important?
Automation is a journey and flexibility is important to our customers when it comes to bridging the gap between Network Engineering and DevOps. Having the ability to deploy infrastructure without provisioning at runtime is a great way to get started. This is useful to our customers, especially when a secondary group, like Security Engineering, wants to validate traffic policies or ensure that traffic destined for the internet is getting steered through a third-party security service.
As organizations gain additional maturity around automation, cloud, and change management, it makes sense to execute provisioning at runtime. With Alkira, you can toggle this option by adding a simple line of configuration to the provider block. This gives our customers the ability to stage changes and validate the outcome prior to any data plane provisioning or provision immediately.
Additional Resources
Alkira is the leader in Cloud Network-as-a-Service and is trusted by Fortune 100 enterprises, leading system integrators, and global managed service providers. You can learn more about Alkira and HashiCorp’s Terraform here:
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