Provision your Cloud Infrastructure using Terraform

Over the past decade, Terraform has become synonymous with Infrastructure as Code (IaC), and countless organizations rely on it to standardize resource provisioning and deployment on any cloud infrastructure. While different cloud providers offer their own management platforms, managing multicloud resources through these disjointed, vendor-specific tools puts organizations back at square one – hopping between interfaces and manually correlating monitoring data.

The emma cloud management platform is a turnkey cloud management solution that standardizes cloud operations across all cloud environments – public, private, local, and industry-specific clouds. In this sense, our ideology aligns perfectly with Terraform. While we are proud of our comprehensive platform that deploys, monitors, and manages multi-cloud resources end-to-end, we also understand that integration with industry-standard platforms is crucial. It gives users the flexibility to stick to the tools they’ve standardized on while still benefiting from emma’s unique capabilities. That’s why we offer several integrations and one of the latest is emma’s Terraform provider.

Introducing emma’s Terraform Provider

emma’s Terraform provider enables Terraform to interact with the emma platform’s APIs. While you can certainly deploy resources across multiple clouds through emma’s intuitive dashboard, our Terraform provider is for those who need complex configurations or simply prefer defining cloud resources through Terraform’s familiar configuration files.

Using emma’s Terraform provider, system admins, DevOps engineers, and development teams can configure cloud resources programmatically within Terraform without interacting directly with emma’s native interface. Terraform interacts with the emma platform through its provider API to create and manage resources according to the defined configuration.

Other users and teams, such as FinOps and Platform engineers, who prefer a visual interface for cloud management can still use emma’s GUI for real-time monitoring, additional configuration changes, or cost optimizations. Essentially, emma’s Terraform provider allows organizations to integrate emma’s core capabilities, such as cross-cloud management and optimization and intercloud networking, within their existing workflows, CI/CD pipelines and toolkits.

Who is it for?

This integration is ideal for users who need Terraform's declarative language for complex use cases, including deep automation, version control, and advanced resource lifecycle management. At the same time, they can reserve emma’s user-friendly approach, multicloud backbone, automation, and visualizations for a variety of other use cases and roles, such as FinOps, security teams, and other non-technical stakeholders.

What does it do?

emma’s Terraform provider allows users to programmatically manage emma-powered cloud environments by writing Terraform configuration files (.tf files) that define the emma-specific resources they want to deploy, such as VMs, spot instances, and more. When users run Terraform commands like terraform apply and terraform plan from the command line, Terraform interacts with emma’s APIs to create, deploy, and manage those resources.

emma's interface still provides additional monitoring, reporting, and manual overrides when necessary. This flexibility to continue using Terrafrom’s CLI allows DevOps and sysadmins to:

1. Leverage Terraform’s full IaC capabilities along with version control and auditing
2. Define complex resource configurations, dependencies, and custom logic
3. Create and use reusable templates in Terraform
4. Remain deeply integrated with their automated CI/CD pipelines for continuous deployment of infrastructure changes.

It offers the best of both worlds – full IaC with Terraform and powerful cloud management through the emma platform.

How does it work?

In just three steps, you can integrate Terraform with the emma platform and benefit from their synergies:

• Install emma’s Terraform provider
• Define resources in the cloud, region, or datacenter of your choice
• Apply configuration

emma deploys the configuration and manages all interactions with each cloud provider’s API. You can simultaneously use emma’s intuitive dashboard for comprehensive visual monitoring, logging, and governance of the deployed resources across all clouds via a single interface.

For detailed instructions and complete documentation, visit the Terraform Providers Registry:

https://registry.terraform.io/providers/emma-community/emma/latest/docs