Using Terraform in private cloud

[Roller Coaster]

Hey, 

I am new to Terraform. I have a requirement of provisioning Docker swarm in private data center which may not have Internet connection to download packages at will. It is possible to bring up a media server and place all the required packages, setup private Docker registry etc as a part of provisioning.

I would like to know whether Terraform supports the use case of provisioning an infra without Internet access. Is it possible to point to a file share (or media server) to pick installation packages like Docker engine, Docker images etc. If so, can you kindly share some samples?

Thanks,

Muthu

[LMR]

we will be using TF for private cloud with VMware. The issue of the internet connection is real with Docker containers. However, there are workarounds. One of your VM that you provision will have to have a Docker private registry with the images you need to pull when you provision all the other nodes etc.

You'll need to orchestrate this... It might not be immediate etc.

However this begs the question of updates and upgrades. Where would you pull them from? Everything becomes more cumbersome.. again I understand the private enterprise.

you might need to use a beachhead system that has internet connection pulling the images and allow the rest of the cluster (with no internet connection) to see the beachhead system and pull from it...

just a suggestion...

all the best

[David Maze]

On Tuesday, September 27, 2016 at 2:55:49 AM UTC-4, Roller Coaster wrote:

I am new to Terraform. I have a requirement of provisioning Docker swarm in private data center which may not have Internet connection to download packages at will. It is possible to bring up a media server and place all the required packages, setup private Docker registry etc as a part of provisioning.

I would like to know whether Terraform supports the use case of provisioning an infra without Internet access. Is it possible to point to a file share (or media server) to pick installation packages like Docker engine, Docker images etc. If so, can you kindly share some samples?

I don't think Terraform is the tool you're looking for.  It will help you get systems or VMs if you're running something like OpenStack, but once you get to "download packages" or "point a file share" or "Docker engine", these aren't concepts that Terraform really deals with.

The usual way to use Terraform for something like this is to use Terraform to allocate your hardware, then use its provisioner capability to invoke another tool like Chef or Ansible to actually install software on those systems.  All of the problems you describe you'd have to solve using that software/configuration management tool.