Terraform for Apache Kafka— How does it impact IT operations and lifecycle management.
In this blog, we will discuss how Terraform impacts IT operations and lifecycle management for Apache Kafka.
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At Axual, we have been using Hashicorp’s Terraform for some time now. This tool is used to write and define Infrastructure as Code (IaC). In this blog, we will discuss how Terraform can impact IT operations and lifecycle management for Apache Kafka. With regard to IT operations, we will take a closer look at setting up hybrid cloud configurations and use this as an example to look at the benefits of Terraform.
In this blog, you will read about the following:
- What is Terraform?
- The impact of Terraform on IT operations
- The challenges of setting up a hybrid cloud
- How Apache Kafka can benefit from Terraform
What is Terraform?
Terraform is an infrastructure as code tool, primarily used by DevOps teams, that lets you define and automate resources (VMs, load balancers, firewalls) for both cloud and on-premise infrastructure. What this means is that Terraform allows programmers to describe the complete infrastructure in the form of code. You can version, reuse and share the code using GitHub. This way, you can use a consistent workflow to provision and manage all of your infrastructure throughout its lifecycle. In addition, infrastructure as code allows you to write once, implement anywhere because it is vendor-agnostic. What Terraform actually does is enable developers to manage low-level components like compute, storage, and networking resources as well as high-level components such as databases, DNS entries and SaaS features.
The nice thing about describing your infrastructure as code is that even when your servers come from different cloud providers, you don’t need to do everything over and over. You can think of terraform as a common language for managing your infrastructure.
How does Terraform work?
Terraform both creates and manages resources for cloud service providers through APIs.
This enables Terraform to work with virtually any platform or service with an accessible API. When using Terraform, the core workflow consists of three stages:
- Writing: You define resources, which may be across multiple cloud providers ;and services. For example, you might create a configuration to deploy an application on virtual machines in a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) network with security groups and a load balancer.
- Planning: Terraform creates an execution plan describing the infrastructure it will create, update, or destroy based on the existing infrastructure and your configuration.
- Apply: Once the code is approved, Terraform executes the operations in precise order, taking into account any resource dependencies. This means that if you update anything within the private cloud, Terraform will recreate the environment before scaling.
The impact of Terraform on IT operations
Where applying version control was a second nature to software engineers, it has taken some time before this was done similarly by operators. Fast-forward to 2022, no one has to explain what “infrastructure as code” means. Mature frameworks like Ansible, Puppet and Terraform are assisting tech teams around the world with their IaC challenges.
As the code or configuration is usually stored in Git repositories, features core to the version control system can be used to have auditing, quality control and governance over everything that happens with what’s stored in the repository. But, this doesn’t necessarily have to be limited to only code and configuration. Any infrastructure running in production can be put under version control and leveraged for continuous deployment to make sure production is always in sync with what’s stored in the repository: GitOps.
This code-based approach means that you don’t need to wait for the IT admin to manually complete the configuration of your environment; you just have to deploy the infrastructure as code.
Terraform and the challenges of setting up hybrid cloud configurations
When working with new technologies, challenges are bound to come up. Because cloud infrastructure is still relatively new and hybrid cloud is something that is just now gaining some traction, setting up these hybrid cloud environments might be challenging. Terraform might help with these challenges.
What is hybrid cloud
A hybrid cloud is a cloud configuration in which applications are running in different environments. Companies have invested a lot of money and labour into building on-premises infrastructure. A common example of a hybrid cloud setup is combining both public and private cloud environments, such as on-premise mainframes combined with a public cloud computing environment, like Azure, Google Cloud Platform or AWS.
Cost management
One of the risks of cloud computing is cost. When working in the cloud, a business can easily increase their processing and computation capabilities without investing in new hardware. These pay-as-you-go models have the benefit of auto-scaling with your organization’s needs. Without proper guidance or restrictions, developers can pick and choose anything they like without necessarily being aware of the cost. But the on-demand and scalable nature of cloud computing means that costs are hard to predict. When managing a hybrid cloud setup, these difficulties will increase as organizations have to monitor multiple cloud vendors.
Governance
Proper IT governance in the cloud is always a challenge. IT governance should guarantee that assets are implemented and used in compliance to policies and procedures. This should ensure that assets and components are controlled and maintained properly. Difficulties with governance might increase as you add additional environments. To ensure your organization’s strategy and goals are met, you need to be able to enforce these policies and procedures.
As we have discussed, Terraform enables organizations to define their infrastructure as code and apply version control to it using tools like Git. Because of this, challenges of hybrid cloud configurations are addressed by Infrastructure as code tools such as Terraform. This in turn
How Apache Kafka users can benefit from a hybrid cloud setup
For enterprises, hybrid cloud setups may come in handy. Some streaming applications might be required to run in different environments due to various reasons. Being able to choose from different options allows you to decide where your data resides and where computing happens. This allows you to improve privacy and enables compliance for regulated organizations. Because Apache Kafka is widely used within regulated industries, being able to leverage hybrid configurations gives the option to comply with rules and regulations.
For example, certain microservices within a banking application handle personal or sensitive data. As a bank, you might choose to handle these on-premises to exercise full control over the data, allowing you to be GDPR-compliant.
Terraform for the Axual platform
Existing Kafka GitOps tools work directly on Kafka, bypassing any governance or control layer that was put in place by the operators, which is unacceptable for enterprise organizations. As of Axual Platform 2022.3, if you want to declare your topics and their topic configurations, you can do so with the Terraform Provider for Axual.
In the following short video, you see a demo on how this Terraform provider can be used to ….
- Define topic ownership
- Create topics
- Define application ownership
- Create applications
- Configure application certificates
- Perform topic configurations
- Authorize an application to produce/consume from a topic
GitOps for Apache Kafka – Terraform provider for Axual
Terraform manages Kafka-specific configurations, including those that may need dynamic adjustments, by allowing users to define these configurations as code within their Terraform scripts. For dynamic elements such as partition counts or replication factors, users can update their Terraform configurations and reapply them. Terraform will then calculate the difference between the current state and the desired state, applying only the necessary changes. This approach ensures that configurations can be dynamically adjusted as needed while maintaining a record of these changes through version-controlled Terraform files. However, for real-time adjustments based on performance metrics, additional tooling or scripts might be required to monitor these metrics and trigger Terraform updates accordingly.
For integrating Terraform with Kafka’s security mechanisms, Terraform can automate the provisioning of Kafka clusters with ACLs and SASL/SSL configurations by defining these settings within the Terraform scripts. Users can specify security settings directly in the Terraform configuration files for Kafka resources, such as topics and brokers. This includes defining ACLs for controlling access to topics and configuring SASL/SSL for secure communication between clients and the Kafka cluster. By managing these configurations as code, Terraform enables consistent and repeatable security setups across Kafka deployments, simplifying the enforcement of security best practices within an organization’s Kafka ecosystem.
In conclusion
Like most mission-critical applications, Apache Kafka benefits from infrastructure as code because it allows you to automate your CI/CD pipelines. In turn, making life easier because you don’t have to worry about configuring every environment separately. In addition, because you use code to define your infrastructure, you can use tools like GitHub to implement version control.
Do you want to learn more about how we implemented Terraform within Axual, feel free to contact us
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Terraform is an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool that allows developers and DevOps teams to define, automate, and manage infrastructure resources across multiple cloud and on-premise environments. For Apache Kafka, Terraform simplifies the management of Kafka clusters and resources like topics, security settings, and partitioning. It helps automate tasks, apply changes consistently, and manage infrastructure through a version-controlled workflow.
Terraform helps set up and manage hybrid cloud configurations by automating the provisioning of resources across both on-premises and cloud environments. For Apache Kafka, this means you can run streaming applications in different environments, improving flexibility, privacy, and compliance with regulations. Terraform makes managing these hybrid setups easier by handling infrastructure provisioning consistently across different cloud providers and environments.
Terraform improves security and governance in Apache Kafka by allowing organizations to define access controls, security configurations (like ACLs and SASL/SSL), and resource management as code. This ensures consistent, repeatable security setups across Kafka deployments. With version control, Terraform also facilitates auditing and governance, ensuring all infrastructure changes are tracked and in compliance with organizational policies.
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