All my Terraform files are synced with my storage in Cloud Shell.Cloud Shell is kept up to date with the latest version of Terraform and any dependencies.My commands execute in Cloud Shell, so if I have any connectivity issues from my local machine, they should not impact things.I can get up and running with Terraform very quickly No need to create service principals or set up a provider with credentials. I don’t have to care about authenticating to Azure in my Terraform files this is taken care of for me by Cloud Shell.My Terraform files are on my machine (in this case checked out from Git), but when I run “Azure Terraform Plan”, the extension takes care of syncing the latest copy of the file up to cloud shell, and then running the “Plan” command directly in Cloud Shell.īy utilising Cloud Shell, I get several benefits: It provides commands for all the standard Terraform functions, but where it is different is it runs all these commands in Cloud shell, not on my local machine. What this extension does is provide integration between VS Code and Terraform running in Azure Cloud Shell. This is a Microsoft extension, but I hadn’t seen it before, and I’ve found it very useful during the development process.

When I started this work, I stumbled across the Azure Terraform extension for VS Code. I’ve also been live streaming some of this work on Twitch so if your interested in watching how this is done, or want to ask a question, please do join me. In particular, this has focussed on creating AKS clusters and then using Terraform to set these up and deploy all the standard services on top of the cluster. I’ve been doing more work with Terraform and Azure recently, particularly around deployments that need to deploy both Azure and non-Azure resources at the same time.

Terraform plugins extensions