Terraform Specific Kind Of Resources You Should Know!

In this post, I will attempt to explain what the some usefull resources and how they can be used with an examples.

Generate Random String

# Generate a random string name
resource "random_string" "name" {
  length = 8
  upper = false
  number = true
  lower = true
  special = false
}

You can use random resource in order to create a unique name for some resources where you can't use the same name i.g creating resource group

you can use this resource as below:
 name = "${random_string.name.result}"

Wait Resource:
this resource is very helpful if you want for sometime to get the resource ready before creating or executing different operation. i.g wait till you get the VM up and running before you run Shell script on it.

resource "time_sleep" "wait_60_seconds" {
  depends_on = [XYZ]
  create_duration = "60s"
}

Null resource, which is very helpful if you want to run/execute command on remote machine as example

resource "null_resource" "configure_identity" {  
    triggers = {
        id = azurerm_network_interface.nic.id
    }    provisioner "local-exec" {
        # Run any command
    }    depends_on = [azurerm_signalr_service.signalr_service]
}

Dynamic Block,  You can dynamically construct repeatable nested blocks like setting using a special dynamic block type, which is supported inside resource, data, provider, and provisioner blocks:

resource "azurerm_network_security_group" "nsg" {
    name                = var.nsg_name
    location            = azurerm_resource_group.rg.location
    resource_group_name = azurerm_resource_group.rg.name
    dynamic "security_rule" {
        for_each = var.sec_rules
        content {
            name                       = security_rule.value["name"]
            priority                   = security_rule.value["priority"]
            direction                  = security_rule.value["direction"]
            access                     = security_rule.value["access"]
            protocol                   = security_rule.value["protocol"]
            source_port_range          = security_rule.value["source_port_range"]
            destination_port_range     = security_rule.value["destination_port_range"]
            source_address_prefix      = "*"
            destination_address_prefix = "*"
        }
    }
     tags  = merge(var.tags, {
          environment : "Prod"
          })
}