William Collins

Sometimes, especially if you aren’t a developer by trade, you can get stuck on something small that will find you banging your forehead on your desk (figuratively, of course). Most of the time, it is easy enough to find an answer online or even from ChatGPT. Other times, you may not be so lucky. The other day, I fell victim to a TWE or time wasting event that I thought was worth writing about. Fasten your seatbelt!

For many moons, importing existing infrastructure (that is to say, infrastructure running outside of Terraform state), has not been a trivial task. Historically, Terraform did not generate any configuration. You would have to write the infrastructure-as-code in a manner that reflects how it was deployed. Then, to make matters not easier, you would fetch the ‘ol shovel and dig out the unique resource identifiers to feed through the command line. Handling a single resource in this manner is pretty simple. Wrangling 20+ resources like this is not. Last month, Terraform v1.5.0 was released, offering the ability to use import blocks. Let’s test this new feature on my favorite infrastructure provider, Alkira.

What fits somewhere in between re:Invent and Community Day events? That would be the AWS Summits! This year, I got to experience a double dose of fun by representing Alkira at our booth and presenting at the AWS Community Developer Lounge. I may be biased, but I believe the Alkira team is the best in the world.

I recently wrote a blog about generating Terraform with ChatGPT. In that experiment, I was using GPT-3.5. It didn’t take much to trip up the galactic AI in many of the experiments I did with Terraform and beyond. According to OpenAI GPT-4 soars past its predecessor in its advanced reasoning capabilities. Let’s use this model to build code in Python and Go. How will the super titan fair in the Sysadmin arena? Let’s take on some tedious backend work head-on with the biggest brain around and see what happens.

Usually, when it comes to technology, my grandmother doesn’t know much because she doesn’t care. What is the cloud? How to install a new browser on her laptop? What is 2FA? I might be speaking French to her as I discuss these things. Yet, she knows what ChatGPT is. This shows the vast amount of publicity, hype, and polarization that has ensued since November 2022. I tend to avoid AI fear-mongering and focus more on, how could a tool like this help enhance my daily grind? Can ChatGPT write Terraform as elegantly as a poem written from the perspective of Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction? Let’s take it for a spin on AWS using infrastructure-as-code.

In Part 1, we talked about the origins of the Site-to-Site VPN Service in AWS. As consumers began to scale in the early days, they faced tunnel sprawl, performance constraints, and the need for a simplified design. AWS responded with Transit Gateway. How did Transit Gateway simplify architecture leading to smoother operations, better network performance, and a scalable blueprint for the future network?