In this video, you will learn about OCIs Resource Manager Service. Before we get into Resource Manager as a service, let us understand how could one use Terraform. As per the understanding we have so far, you could have OCI tenancy with you, and you may use various options to interact with it, including Browser console, Terraform, etc. But let us say you decided to go with Terraform based, orchestrating the sources, and you set up Terraform in a computer outside OCI, maybe your laptop, maybe a computer in your on-premise environment and you configure API keys to be able to authenticate and manage the resources. As a result, you keep your configuration files and state files in the Terraform computer that you have and manage other sources. Which means you need an infrastructure to setup data form. Alternatively, you could also create a Compute instance within OCI. VM or bare metal Compute instance and setup Terraform, you can either configure API Keys and credentials to log in, or use it as an instance principal and make it a member of a dynamic group and grant privileges. But still, you would have to have to pay for this compute instance for which you are using within OCI. Thus, in the first case where you are using your own infrastructure and on-premises, or you are using a compute instance in OCI, you have to invest in this infrastructure. Whereas Resource Manager is a service that is provided within OCI. As a result, Resource Manager is fundamentally Terraform as a service provided within OCI, it is given free of cost. You don't need to pay for the Compute instance in which Resource Manager is run. Fundamentally, Resource Manager is a free service within OCI which internally gives you Terraform as a service. Where is this service in in OCI? If I go to the Console and go to Resource Manager from the menu, which is right over here, there are various options available which we will discuss as we go through this video. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure in Resource Manager can be considered as Terraform as a Service. As a tenant, you don't need to worry about in which computer where it is running, it is fully managed by Oracle and it has a collection of stack. Each stack is fundamentally a Terraform configuration that you need to upload. It is not that you don't need to learn Terraform, you of course need to know how to write your Terraform scripts. It is just that you create the scripts in your environment and push them into Terraform as a stack and use them to plan, apply, destroy, etc. At any given time, you can either perform a plan, or destroy or apply on a given stack. Each operation results in a job. You can upload your own zip files, and you can also reverse engineer resources within OCI, which I will show you in a demonstration later. Permissions are fundamentally determined by who is the user, who is logging in and creating the Terraform stacks. Depending on the IAM privileges, only such that resources can be orchestrated. You first need to define your configuration, then go into OCI and upload your configuration. You create a stack. Right now we will say I want to upload my configuration from your local environment where your browser is running. You can upload a folder or create a zip file of all Terraform configuration files and upload them. Once you have a stack in place, you will have possibly variables in your Terraform configuration. Then you give the details about the variables. You go and run the commands to plan or apply and destroy. Each time you do that, a job is created to either plan apply, or destroy and resources are provisioned, are managed, are orchestrated based on your stack that you have. Whenever you run a plan, Terraform within the Resource Manager will go through your Terraform configuration and give you what it will do. That is all the idea is. If you create an apply job, it will consider the plan and create resources. When it creates the resources, it will result in a state file that it creates and the state file is maintained within Resource Manager itself. Thus, using Terraform, you will have the chance of setting up your own infrastructure and using it or use OCIs Resource Manager where Terraform is offered as a service to manage our Terraform based orchestration with the OCI. This is a high-level overview about Resource Manager. In the next video, I will give you some demonstrations of how do you use Resource Manager stacks and create and manage resources within your tenancy, some samples will be given.
