Introducing the Azure Terraform Resource Provider

Today, Microsoft announced a new enhancement to the Azure Resource Manager (ARM) that will enable ARM to leverage HashiCorp Terraform to provision third party services directly via ARM. This announcement reinforces the strong partnership between HashiCorp and Microsoft and furthers our goal of providing users with the workflows necessary to provision any infrastructure for any application.

The new Azure Terraform Resource Provider will help users who manage their Azure infrastructure via ARM to also manage external services via the same JSON based ARM script. Initial services available in ARM via the Terraform Resource Provider include Kubernetes, Datadog, and Cloudflare. With support for over 70 infrastructure providers, Terraform as a standalone tool continues to be ideal to provision and manage multi-cloud environments alongside a broad list of heterogeneous infrastructure components.

»Using Terraform Providers via ARM

Operators are able to add providers to their ARM templates by identifying both the Terraform provider type and the resource type. The providerregistration type identifies the Terraform provider and contains connection and authentication information. The resource type maps onto a resource type in Terraform.

For a more detailed look at how these types are defined in ARM, Microsoft has published this blog, which walks through an example configuration.

»Provider Support

The ARM Resource Provider has been released as a private preview by Microsoft to provide ARM users seamless access to Terraform’s rich set of third party ISV providers. At launch, the third party services that will be supported include:

•    [Kubernetes](https://www.terraform.io/docs/providers/kubernetes/index.html)<br>
  

•    [Datadog](https://www.terraform.io/docs/providers/datadog/index.html)<br>
  

•    [Cloudflare](https://www.terraform.io/docs/providers/cloudflare/index.html)<br>
  

As it moves out of the private preview and into GA additional services will be supported. This will be for 3rd party services only while other cloud infrastructure providers will not be supported via this integration. Terraform is still the tool to do cross-cloud management.

»Want to Learn More?

For those attending Microsoft Build this week, HashiCorp has a booth in the Expo Hall (booth E-18) and we will have a number of employees there to answer all your HashiCorp related questions. Additionally, Tom Harvey, one of our Terraform Software Engineers, will be co-presenting at a breakout session BRK2121 on Terraform and Azure at 1 PM on Wed (May 9, 2018).

For more information about HashiCorp Terraform, please visit: https://www.hashicorp.com/terraform.