In this blog, I will show you how we can create an Alibaba Cloud Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) by using Terraform.
Introduction to Alibaba Cloud VPC
A Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) is a secure, isolated private cloud hosted within a public cloud. VPC provision logically isolated sections of the public cloud in order to provide a virtual network environment.
As we know, a VPC is a logically isolated data center inside your region, so that your data and applications are entirely separate from your provider’s other clients. A VPC also offers redundancy and fault tolerance availability zone architecture to decrease the tenancy and keep applications secure and available at every moment.
The most important aspects of cloud computing are privacy, security, and preventing loss of confidential data. To achieve all of this, VPC is an effective solution because you don’t need any particular hardware and physical data centers. The VPC will make sure your environment is totally isolated from other clients.
As an example, consider if an ECS Server is inside the VPC, then you have full control over it. You can manage in which subnet you want your ECS Server to be. You also have full control over the route table where you can manage all routes. If you have multiple servers inside a VPC, you can directly communicate with them without using the Internet. You can also establish a secure connection with other VPCs by using a VPN and VPC-peering connection with minimum latency.
Steps to create an Alibaba Cloud VPC Using Terraform
1) First, take access to your Alibaba Cloud ECS server and install Terraform on that server. To install Terraform refer to this video:
To take access to your ECS server use the public IP/internet IP of your server.
2) Now, go to the directory where you have installed the Terraform package. To check that Terraform is successfully installed, run the command terraform version
3) Once Terraform is installed, create the provider configuration file in .tf extension. The Terraform configuration must declare which providers are required, so that terraform can install and use them. In this blog, I have created a configuration file with the name “provider.tf “. However, you can use any name with .tf extension. In my case, I will create the provider for Alibaba Cloud.
4) Now, run command terraform init to initialize the working directory containing the Terraform configuration file.
5) Once Terraform is initialized, create the Terraform main file with .tf extension which contains the piece of code required to create the VPC and the vSwitch . In my case, I name it “main.tf”.
6) Next, run the command terraform plan. This command is used to create and execute the plan. You will see the resources that Terraform will create on your Alibaba Cloud account. This step is very important before deploying the actual resources in order to check that all is correct.
7) If all is correct, the last step is to run the terraform apply command which is used to apply the changes.
8) Now let’s test if the changes are applied. Go to the Alibaba Cloud VPC Console and check if the VPC was successfully created.
About Roopu Cloud
If you have any questions or concerns about Alibaba Cloud, you can contact us. We are experts in building and implementing cloud solutions in the Alibaba Cloud platform as well as in other Chinese cloud platforms. Let us help you!
