3 min readUpdated Jan 30, 2023

Ably Terraform provider: provision & configure Ably programmatically

Ably Terraform provider: 
provision & configure Ably programmatically
Andra DinuAndra Dinu

The Ably Terraform provider greatly simplifies the provisioning and managing of realtime architectures that include Ably via HashiCorp Terraform.

Our growing reliance on realtime applications is highlighted both by the impact of incidents such as WhatApp’s latest outage, and by an exponential growth in use cases for realtime technology. This growth is spurred on by the fast adoption of dynamically orchestrated, microservice-oriented cloud architectures.

As realtime becomes mission-critical for more and more companies, the need to integrate the management of realtime infrastructure into infrastructure as code (IaC) tools increases. Managing realtime infrastructure from within the application code or using solutions outside the IaC ecosystem means that management of the production environment is fragmented and hard to synchronize.  

This is why Ably now plugs into HashiCorp Terraform, the most popular Infrastructure-as-Code tool on the market.

Ably & Terraform

HashiCorp and Ably are partnered together to support realtime infrastructure management using IaC through the use of the new Terraform provider for Ably.

Terraform automates the provisioning and management workflow for infrastructure resources in any cloud. It's an open-source project with incredible flexibility, supporting all the most prominent cloud platforms, but also many other solution providers and SaaS tools. You can describe the desired state of your infrastructure in a simple configuration language and let Terraform plan and apply these changes in an automated way.

Ably is part of the software architecture of many high-scale cloud-based applications, enabling services and products to deliver complete realtime functionality directly to their end users.

How the Ably Terraform provider works

Using this provider you can automate the provisioning, management, and testing of your Ably realtime infrastructure.

Repetitive operations such as creating, configuring or deleting Ably apps, enumerating queues, creation of rules, and other tasks that would be time-consuming to carry out manually, can be automated using this provider. You can implement multi-tenancy solutions for your customers, and create configuration-driven environments that can easily be replicated.

Let’s watch the provider  in action:


About the Ably Terraform Provider

The Ably Terraform provider is built on top of the Ably Control API. Once these environments are created you can also test them using Ably Control API. With the Ably Terraform provider, you can create and manage:

The Ably Terraform provider is built on top of the Ably Control API

To start using the Ably Terraform provider you need to authenticate with Ably. You can find a complete set of instructions on how to get started and use the Ably Terraform provider here.

As always, we’d love to hear your views and questions. You can contact us at any time if you would like to send feedback.

Further reading

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