Aiven Provider for Terraform hits 1M downloads

One million is a milestone number. That’s why, when Aiven Provider for Terraform reaches one million downloads on the public Terraform registry, it deserves a celebratory blog post.

To better appreciate this milestone, let’s find out where the Aiven Terraform Provider came from, and its rise from humble beginnings to the awesome tool we offer today. Join us, and learn what use cases made us build the provider in the first place; discover some teasers of what’s coming in the roadmap; and find out how you can contribute to this open source tool.

How did we get here?

From early on, the engineers at Aiven knew that providing automation tools for our customers was important. Our customers needed a tool to interact with Aiven services, to automatically provision and make changes to their data infrastructure and to tear down the infrastructure on demand. There were lots of automation tools already available, but Terraform stood out as the de-facto standard to build and manage infrastructure.

(Besides a Terraform provider, Aiven also offers a purpose-built Kubernetes operator. If you’d like to learn more about when to choose Kubernetes and when to choose Terraform, take a look at Kubernetes vs Terraform on the Aiven blog.)

The first commit to the Aiven Provider for Terraform GitHub repository was on February 23, 2017 by Jelmer Snoeck. Since then, new and exciting features have been added to this provider - all with the same goal of making developers’ lives easier using the power of automation.

The GA version of the Aiven Terraform Provider was the first to support all Aiven resource types. Before the major release of version 3.0.0, customers had to use the same Terraform resource to provision all Aiven services and each service was identified by a flag "service_type". From version 3.0.0 of the provider, each service was identified by individual resource names in Terraform (for example, "aiven_kafka", "aiven_pg", etc). Based on the feedback from customers, more service specific documentation and examples were added.

Our current customers have also discovered the benefits of using Terraform. For example, NetSpyGlass uses it to simplify their service management in a complex environment based on Aiven for Apache Kafka® and PostgreSQL®.

What's next?

In the future, you can expect:

• Faster updates for user configuration options--we’re automating it.
• More documentation about processes, such as Aiven Provider for Terraform v2 to v3 migration guide.
• Better testing coverage for the provider code, for example VPC peering test cases will cover all possible clouds and combinations.

Wrapping up

We can’t wait for the next milestone of Aiven Provider for Terraform and invite you to be part of this journey. If you are managing your Aiven services using the console or CLI, give Aiven Provider for Terraform a try! It's now well proven in production with more than 1 million downloads.

The tool itself is an open-source project that is looking for both technical and documentation contributions. We look forward to your contribution. Please reach out on Twitter if you have any questions.

Thanks to Aleksander Zaruczewski, Ivan Savciuc, and Michael Hoffmann for helping to put this post together!

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