Why Use Terraform? Benefits, Workflow, and Bulk Export in Cloud Infrastructure

Before Terraform, cloud resources were created manually through provider consoles, which caused several issues: no unified management of resources, high risk of accidental changes that could disrupt services, and time‑consuming repetitive operations.

Terraform introduces Infrastructure as Code, allowing resources to be described in declarative HCL files. This makes parameters explicit, enables rapid replication of similar resources, and standardizes provisioning. Changes are previewed with terraform plan and applied with terraform apply, while the code repository and backend store state and facilitate review.

At Flowing Talk, a front‑end portal called Luban lets users select required parameters to request resources. The back‑end generates the corresponding Terraform code and triggers a GitOps pipeline. After a Git commit, the Mobius engine receives a webhook, runs terraform plan, and posts the plan for review. Approvers can approve the plan, which triggers another webhook to execute terraform apply. Upon successful apply, Mobius merges the code and notifies the requester via an internal chat bot.

For existing resources, terraform import can bring them under Terraform management by syncing them to the backend state file. To export many resources at once, the open‑source tool Terraformer is used, but it needs adaptation to match the company’s repository layout and naming conventions.

The adapted bulk‑export process includes:

Export resources per application into separate directories.

Rename resources and adjust corresponding .tf and .tfstate files.

Upload the state files to an OSS backend.

Push the Terraform files to a GitLab repository.

Run terraform plan to verify that no changes are pending.

Finally, the article lists Terraform’s advantages: reproducible and reliable infrastructure, easy creation and modification of resources, consistency across environments, repeatable processes, and safe change management, all of which enable standardized, traceable, and automated multi‑cloud operations.