We just went through six chapters of intense coding. It is easy to forget what it was all about a hundred pages ago, so let's quickly summarize the journey we are almost through with.

Chapter 1, Infrastructure Automation, was not entirely about Terraform -- you learned a few general principles of modern infrastructure automation and, more importantly, you got to learn what Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is. If you want to be successful in doing modern operations, understanding IaC in depth is a must. This book only covers one particular tool, so you need to do some extra reading to really master the ideas behind IaC. Perhaps the most comprehensive work on this topic is a book titled Infrastructure as Code: Managing Servers in The Cloud by Kief Morris.

In addition, check out Infrastructure as Code (IAC) Cookbook by Stephane Jourdan and Pierre Pomes, which has many practical examples of different IaC tools, including Terraform.

That very first chapter also listed some requirements to a tool such as Terraform. Terraform is not the only tool of this kind though. It is important to know alternatives and to consider each of them for your particular use case. Here is a list of the most important technologies in this area; investigate each of them at least a bit:

• CloudFormation, for AWS environments
• Heat, for OpenStack environments
• Chef provisioning, for Chef-heavy environments
• Various Puppet modules, if you rely on Puppet a lot (look for the puppetlabs-aws module as a starting point)
• SparkleFormation, the new tool that covers all major cloud providers and builds on top of native cloud templating services such as CloudFormation