Say Hello To Azure Terrafy

Terraform is an infrastructure automation tool developed by HashiCorp four years
ago and it is written in the Go programming language. It is the first multi-cloud
infrastructure tool that allows the user to automate and set up infrastructure elements
from several cloud vendors simultaneously, as well as custom in-house solutions

let's start by the definition, so what is Azure Terrafy?

Azure Terrafy allows you to easily and quickly import your existing Azure infrastructure into Terraform HCL AND import it into your Terraform state. This has been one of the BIGGEST and coolest feature releases.
It’s great to adopt new working tools and practices for when we start a new project, but every single customer I work with wants to know how to manage their legacy infrastructure. The biggest challenge we face in ITOps is managing that legacy infrastructure.

 How To?

Note: Before using the tool I installed : Terraform, Golang, Choco on my Windows 10 Machine

1- To start using the aztfy tool, we need to install it locally. There are two options: the latest binaries or running the Go toolchain. You can run the Go toolchain using a single command

go install github.com/Azure/aztfy@latest

2- Once installed, run the aztfy command and specify the Azure resource group that you want to import
Note: Currently aztfy only supports importing at the resource group level)

  3- Aztfy will now begin the import process:

it found 394 resources in my resource group along with their dependencies.  From this view we can filter our results, show any errors/recommendations, or import our resources

4- Click W to start importing resources as it run, along with a progress bar

5- Once Azure Terrafy has completed, you can open your folder and see the newly generated template files:

6- The best way to validate the importing of your resources is by running ‘Terraform Plan

Congratulations! You’ve successfully imported your existing infrastructure in Azure into Terraform templates!

While this makes importing existing resources a breeze, there are some things to be conscious of at this point.

• Naming conventions and reusability. While the templates are able to be used, naming conventions for your resources need to be reconfigured and all elements are defined in a very static way. You will need to manually edit and declare your variables to make the templates more scalable and reusable. 
• State storage. When you import your Terraform files, the state is saved to the local file store, work needs to be done to store it remotely in a more secure way.
• Code refactoring. Aztfy currently spits out the templates into one main.tf file, splitting out your templates into modules should be considered. You will need to spend some time in VSCode and make the new files more reusable and scalable.
• Dependencies. Aztfy uses many of the dependencies in your resource group to map those out in the templates (see the 'depends_on' line declared in the main.tf above), much of that can be cleaned up once naming conventions and modules are implemented.
• Import of Resource Groups. Currently, you can only import resource groups. Expect the product team to look into this, potentially making it available to import vNets or maybe even subscriptions!