Terraform
Filling the gaps in your code with the Terraform azapi provider for Azure
The cloud is just someone else’s computer and to manage that we prefer to use Infrastructure as Code (IaC). dataroots believes that IaC can benefit any team working with cloud resources and most often Terraform is our tool of choice there. As a data & cloud engineer focusing on Microsoft Azure, that is true for me as well. However, there have been a couple of hick-ups along the road.
Setting up your machine for local Terraform provider development
If you’ve been developing Terraform providers, you might have upgraded your machine to use the newly released Terraform 0.13. This version introduces a lot of changes related to where providers can be found. Before version 0.13 you would just put the binary of your provider in ~/.terraform.d/plugins and you could start using your provider. There is a lot more to it in Terraform 0.13 and newer.
Debugging a Terraform provider
While contributing to a couple of Terraform providers I often found the need to set some breakpoints in the provider code and inspect what was going at runtime. However, debugging Terraform providers is not that easy apparently… I found a way to do this VS Code, but feel free to drop me a line if you have some other tips & tricks and I’ll update this post.