Using Terraform in AWS Mumbai

Terraform is a fantastic tool to manage your infrastructure with simple and declarative templates; you simply describe your infrastructure in a template file that looks like:

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resource "digitalocean_droplet" "web" {
    name = "tf-web"
    size = "512mb"
    image = "centos-5-8-x32"
    region = "sfo1"
}

resource "dnsimple_record" "hello" {
    domain = "example.com"
    name = "test"
    value = "${digitalocean_droplet.web.ipv4_address}"
    type = "A"
}

run terraform apply and you’re set: Terraform will boot the infrastructure for you.

AWS recently launched their ap-south-1 region (Mumbai, India) and, due to the fact that’s much closer to our customer and EC2 there seems to be ~10% cheaper than in AWS Singapore (where we’re currently hosted), we wanted to start experiment moving part of our infrastructure to this region.

Terraform, though, has an hardcoded list of AWS regions and, since Mumbai is a recent addition, it will throw an error saying that the region isn’t supported.

The guys have already added the new region in master, so we could just wait for the next stable release to be rolled out and we’ll be able to rock it in Mumbai but, since we’re troublemakers, let’s just not wait and figure a way to boot our machines in Mumbai now :)

Since the changes are already in master, we just need to clone the terraform repo and build it locally:

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git clone [email protected]:hashicorp/terraform.git
cd terraform
TF_DEV=1 ./scripts/build.sh

That’s it — a new terraform executable will be created with the latest code from master (if you’re wondering, the TF_DEV variable makes it so we build terraform only for our architecture, else the build.sh script will also build for bsd, darwin, etc).

Nothing more, nothing less :) Have fun booting your infrastucture with Terraform: it’s an amazing tool built by a great company in the DevOps landscape.