Demystifying DevOps Tools

Not to discredit anyone in a DevOps role or what they do. I'm finding it interesting that the tools of the trade aren't as hard as my mind lead them to be. When I hear terms like Terraform, Docker Compose, and Ansible, I imagine the black monoliths from 2001 A Space Odyssey standing in front of me. I have to learn their secrets, but they are also so much of a mystery that it can be intimidating.

I've been learning the basics of Terraform, and it doesn't seem much different from Docker Compose. Both of these remind me of both C and the XML plugins that I write for LackeyCCG. They all have a Header, then a variable name, then an open and close code block.

The more I learn about these things, the more I understand that while the tools may be easy to understand, they are that way for a purpose. It's so people can pick up and run with them. The flip side of that is, there is so much you can do and so much vocabulary that's needed to get things working, they had to make the actual tools easy to use.

I'm looking forward to being able to use Terraform to build some basic AWS resources as testing and building another skillset. I still have a little ways to go, but progress is putting one foot in front of the other and moving forward, no matter how fast.