I’m new to Terraform, I’d like to eventually have a Terraform template of my production resources so I can easily deploy to multi-regions and for disaster recovery. How can I do this if my resources on AWS (EC2, S3,VPC, etc) are already deployed?
3 Answers
You can use terraform import
feature for this. Here is a link to the documentation : https://www.terraform.io/docs/import/index.html
However it's not capable of generating configurations for you. You have to build up the configurations and import the state of resources.
The current implementation of Terraform import can only import resources into the state. It does not generate configuration. A future version of Terraform will also generate configuration.
You can do it incrementally, start writing configurations for resources one by one.
Ex:
- Write configurations for VPC.
- Import VPC state
- Write configs for EC2 instance.
- Import EC2 state
After successfully importing a resource/s. You can use terraform plan
command to ensure the state is correctly matching.
Remember to make use of the terraform modules (https://www.terraform.io/docs/modules/create.html) to better structure the code so that you could reuse them with other regions and environments.
Here's an article which describes a way to use terraform with multi-region deployments. https://medium.com/@ctindel/multi-region-aws-app-deployments-with-terraform-modules-859c9ecb64f4

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Google has an opensource tool called terraformer for reverse Terraforming an existing AWS stack into tf
and tfstate
files.
They also support GCP (obviously), K8s, Openstack and other platforms.
AWS example usage:
terraformer import aws --resources=vpc,subnet --connect=true --regions=eu-west-1 --profile=prod
terraformer import aws --resources=vpc,subnet --filter=aws_vpc=vpc_id1:vpc_id2:vpc_id3 --regions=eu-west-1

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Does this still work? Is this still a vetted tool? – Mars2024 Jun 15 '22 at 20:59
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Is this tool still good to use?? – Mars2024 Jun 15 '22 at 21:43
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@小红书 it's not an official google product as stated in the project readme, however it has had some recent commits. Might be best to check out the issues to see how stable it is: https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/terraformer/issues – Dylan Hogg Jun 16 '22 at 11:20
I think you should try considering "Terraforming" in this case. It will export your current aws infrastructure in terraform style.
You may also consider using segment stack of production-ready modules of terraform, which you can use as the way you want to.

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