Deploying VMs on Linode with Terraform

Linode (or Akamai Cloud as it is now sort of been rebranded to) is/was the choice for self-hosting enthusiasts wanting to deploy services on the cloudd. They’ve been around for two and a half decades and were seen as the ‘independent’ alternative to the big providers. The services you deploy on their platform are referred to as Linodes.

A Linode is simply a VM, or cloud-based virtual machine.

If you haven’t already got a Linode account then click here to sign-up and take advantage of my lovely referral code which will give you $100 of credit.

Actually creating a VM

There’s basically two way to do it: either log in to your Linode account on the web and then manually go through the configuration process, or we can use Linode’s API with either Ansible or Terraform.

As you’ve probably already seen, my preferred method for provisioning these sorts of services is Terraform (or OpenTofu).

That’s Terraform for building the house, and Ansible for the interior.