Terraform to manage baremetal infrastructure

[Sivaram Kannan]

Hi all,

I am trying to understand how to use terraform to manage bare metal infrastructure. It is not very clear to me from the documentation in terraform.io or other posts in the web how to populate the infrastructure configuration. Most of the documentation is primarily focussed on managing AWS resources, it gives a feeling terraform is suited for AWS and not to a inhouse baremetal infrastructure. 

Can someone point me to documentation which talks about configuring baremetal machines please?

Thanks,

./Siva.

[David Adams]

Hi Siva! Terraform is not a configuration management tool. You might want to look into SaltStack, Chef, or Puppet for the use case you describe.

Some context if you would like to read more about what Terraform is good at:

https://www.terraform.io/intro/use-cases.html

https://www.terraform.io/intro/vs/chef-puppet.html

-dave

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[Nate B]

It looks like David didn't read your post. I have the same question. Perhaps your use of the word "configuring" confused him. Anyway, I agree that it's unclear from the default documentation how Terraform can be used against bare metal infrastructure, that is, not a VM, container, or cloud provider.

The following looks like an example of a case where someone used Terraform with Tectonic to do this for CoreOS:

https://coreos.com/tectonic/docs/latest/install/bare-metal/metal-terraform.html

Packet also works for this:

https://twitter.com/hashicorp/status/656872412089225216

Anyway, I found the above with a little searching.

But the source code may be a better place to look:

https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/search?q=metal&type=Commits&utf8=%E2%9C%93

How were you able to automate your hardware setup?

Did you end up using Terraform along with a tool like Saltstack or Puppet?

[Joe Topjian]

Your source code link is relevant here as it returns a result for the initial commit of the Cobbler provider. Documentation on the Cobbler provider can be found here:

https://www.terraform.io/docs/providers/cobbler/index.html

For those not familiar with Cobbler, it's an open source project which manages PXE/network boot environments - commonly used for provisioning bare metal servers.

If this sounds appealing, I recommend first trying Cobbler outside of Terraform to get a feel of how it works. Cobbler is extremely flexible which also means it has a lot of settings and knobs :)

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