Reverse-engineering IaC

Often, we aren’t creating a brand-new data infrastructure but extending existing resources that we want to automate. So, future changes are automatically tracked and deployed using IaC. You may also need some help building your IaC and would rather create the resources using the AWS console than generate the corresponding code. You can then use this as the basis instead of writing the code from scratch.

In this recipe, you will learn how Terraformer can reverse engineer existing resources to generate Terraform code. This tool is relatively new and still under development, so it’s likely to help you but not do the full work for you.

If you wish to use other IaC tools instead of Terraform, there are reverse-engineering alternatives that you can check in the See also section at the end of this recipe.

Getting ready

To complete this recipe, you need a bash command line with the AWS CLI set up, as indicated in the Technical requirements...