Case study
Cloud automation and management: how Terraform simplifies infrastructure migration
schedule3 min
calendar_today5 March 2025
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In recent years, cloud adoption has made a structured, automated approach to infrastructure management increasingly necessary. When a company has to replicate its infrastructure on another cloud account or migrate resources between different providers, the risk of manual errors and inconsistent configurations is high.
This is where Terraform comes in: an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool that lets you define, manage and replicate infrastructure in a declarative, automated way. Used here for AWS, but compatible with many other providers such as Google Cloud, Azure and Kubernetes, Terraform is a powerful solution for orchestrating cloud resources.
The challenge: replicating and migrating cloud infrastructure
One of our clients needed to move and replicate its virtual instances and other cloud resources to another AWS account. The goal was to keep an identical infrastructure with no downtime and without having to reconfigure every component by hand.
The main challenge? Avoiding human error and ensuring a faithful replica of the existing infrastructure.
The solution: Terraform for automation and scalability
Instead of going through a long and risky manual configuration, we implemented a Terraform-based strategy that allowed us to export the existing configuration and apply it to another cloud environment in a few steps.
Step 1: exporting the resources with Terraformer
We used Terraformer, an open-source extension of Terraform, to export the existing AWS infrastructure:
terraformer import aws --resources=ec2_instance --profile profilo-esempio --regions eu-south-1This gave us a complete set of Terraform files containing all the configurations of the EC2 instances and their dependencies.
Step 2: cleaning up and optimizing the code
Once the resources were exported, we refined the code by removing the instances that were not needed and keeping only the critical ones. For example, we renamed the instances with fictitious names such as app-server-prod and app-server-dev (example names), to keep things organized in a clearer, more manageable way.
We then checked that the resources were correctly parameterized so they could be reused across different environments, with no rigid dependencies that could cause compatibility problems.
Step 3: provisioning the resources on the new account
After configuring the new cloud account, we updated the Terraform provider to point to the new credentials:
provider "aws" {
profile = "nuovo-account"
region = "eu-south-1"
}Finally, we launched the creation of the instances in the new account with a single command:
terraform applyWithin a few minutes, the entire infrastructure had been faithfully replicated in the new account, with no errors and minimal manual intervention.
Terraform: an ally for multi-cloud management
Terraform is not just an ally for AWS: it supports many cloud providers, including:
- Google Cloud Platform (GCP) for managing Compute Engine instances, Cloud Storage and BigQuery.
- Microsoft Azure, with support for Virtual Machines, Azure SQL and App Services.
- Kubernetes, for automated provisioning of clusters and deployments.
- VMware, DigitalOcean, OpenStack and many others, ensuring interoperability and scalability.
Thanks to its flexibility, Terraform lets companies take a multi-cloud approach, avoiding lock-in with a single provider and optimizing their IT resources.
Cloud automation: a necessary step forward
Automated infrastructure management has become essential for companies that want to scale efficiently and securely. With Terraform, you can reduce the risk of errors, speed up deployment times and ensure consistency across different environments.
If your company is considering a cloud migration or multi-cloud management, adopting a Terraform-based strategy can considerably simplify the process and improve operational efficiency.
Want to optimize your cloud infrastructure? Contact us for a consultation and find out how we can help you improve the management of your IT resources.