// 31 - Deploying to Azure through Terraform Cloud

You may have heard of Terraform, but are you aware of Terraform Cloud or Terraform Enterprise? In this session, Chris gives a practical walkthrough of how he uses Terraform Cloud as the underlying engine to deploy some of his own projects onto Azure.

What is Terraform?

Terraform is an open-source Infrastructure as Code (IaC) framework from HashiCorp that uses HCL (HashiCorp Configuration Language) to define cloud resources declaratively. Unlike ARM templates, Terraform is cloud-agnostic and has a rich provider ecosystem — including the Azure RM provider used throughout this session.

Terraform Cloud vs. self-managed state

One key decision when adopting Terraform is where to store state. This session compares using an Azure Storage Account as a Terraform backend (self-managed) with Terraform Cloud’s fully managed remote state — which also provides locking, history, and team collaboration features out of the box.

CI/CD pipeline for infrastructure

Chris demonstrates a VCS-driven workflow where Terraform Cloud integrates directly with GitHub. On pull request, a speculative terraform plan runs automatically; on merge, terraform apply is triggered — bringing GitOps principles to infrastructure management.

Modules, workspaces, and service principals

The session also covers how to structure reusable Terraform modules, use workspaces to manage multiple environments (dev, staging, prod), and configure an Azure service principal for secure, headless authentication. We even get meta and look at how Terraform can bootstrap Terraform Cloud itself.