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InfoQ Homepage News AWS Cloud Control Terraform Provider Enables Quicker Access to AWS Features

AWS Cloud Control Terraform Provider Enables Quicker Access to AWS Features

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HashiCorp has moved the AWS Cloud Control (AWSCC) provider to general availability. The AWSCC provider is automatically generated based on the Cloud Control API published by AWS, implying that new AWS features can be supported in Terraform upon their release. Originally released in 2021 as a tech preview, the move to version 1.0 includes several new features including sample configurations and improved schema-level documentation.

AWSCC is built on top of the AWS Cloud Control API. The Cloud Control API provides CRUDL (create, read, update, delete, and list) operations to use with AWS cloud resources. Any resource type published to the CloudFormation Public Registry has a standard JSON schema that can be used with this API.

As part of this release, there are now over 270 resources with sample configurations. For example, awscc_ec2_key_pair allows for specifying a key pair to use with an EC2 instance. An existing key pair can be specified in the PublicKeyMaterial property; omitting that property will generate a new key pair.

resource "awscc_ec2_key_pair" "example" {
  key_name            = "example"
  public_key_material = ""

  tags = [{
    key   = "Modified By"
    value = "AWSCC"
  }]
}

In addition, more than 75 resources now have improved attribute-level documentation. The resources have detailed descriptions of how to use the attributes within the resource-accepted values. This includes context about the attribute, how it's used, and the expected values for each attribute.

The AWSCC is not meant as a replacement for the standard AWS provider. As noted by Aurora Chun, product marketing manager at HashiCorp, "using the AWSCC and AWS providers together equips developers with a large catalog of resources across established and new AWS services." The providers can be used in conjunction to provision resources:

# Use the AWS provider to provision an S3 bucket
resource "aws_s3_bucket" "example" {
  bucket_prefix = "example"
}
 
# Use the AWSCC provider to provision an Amazon Personalize dataset
resource "awscc_personalize_dataset" "interactions" {
  ...
 
  dataset_import_job = {
    data_source = {
      data_location = aws_s3_bucket.interactions_import.bucket
    }
  }
}

The AWSCC provider is generated from the latest CloudFormation schemas and releases weekly with all new services added to the Cloud Control API. There are some resources in the CloudFormation schema that are not compatible with the AWSCC provider. A full list of these can be found on GitHub.

Within Azure, the AzAPI Provider enables similar support for the Azure ARM (Azure Resource Management) REST APIs. While there isn't a Terraform provider available for it, CloudGraph provides a similar API experience to AWS Cloud Control. CloudGraph has support for AWS, Azure, GCP, and Kubernetes.

The Terraform AWS Cloud Control provider is available for download now from the Terraform Registry. The AWSCC provider requires Terraform CLI version 1.0.7 or higher. The source code for the provider is available on GitHub and is licensed under the MPL-2.0 license. Additional information can be found within the provider document and the tutorial.

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