Transforms your docker-compose file to a Terraform config file!

A minimalistic but highly scalable docker-compose to Terraform config file transformer

Model Driven Engineering (MDE) is a software development approach that focuses on creating and exploiting domain models as the core artifacts of software development. It is based on the idea of separating the development process into two distinct parts : the design of the model and the generation of the software from the model. The goal of MDE is to create a model of the system that can be used to drive the development process, allowing for faster development cycles and improved quality.

Compose file is a YAML file that defines services, networks and volumes for a Docker application. It is used to configure an application’s services, making it easier to manage the application’s containers. Compose file contains all the information needed to run an application, including the application’s dependencies, services, networks and volumes.

The Terraform Configuration Language (HCL - HashiCorp Configuration Language) file is a domain-specific language used by Terraform, an infrastructure as code (IaC) tool. Terraform allows users to define and provision infrastructure resources in a declarative manner.

The process of transforming a Docker compose file to a Terraform config file manually is a labor-intensive task that requires a lot of time and effort.

This is why automating this process, transforming a Docker compose file to Terraform config files, using a model transformation language can help speed up the development process and reduce the amount of time and effort needed to complete the task. This can help streamline the deployment process, allowing developers to deploy their applications to Kubernetes clusters faster and more reliably. In this project we used ETL(Extract, transform, Load) for the transformation process :

In the context of model-driven engineering, model transformation aims to to specify how to produce target models from a set of source models. This allows developers to define how the elements of the source model should be used to initialize the elements of the target model.

I chose Kotlin as I am learning it because it looks cleaner and less verbose than Java, moreover I liked how declarative it looks when writing the transform part of the ETL.

In conclusion, compose2terraform automates the conversion of Docker Compose files to Terraform configurations using Model Driven Engineering and an ETL pipeline. This efficient transformation accelerates development and enhances deployment reliability.