Jump start learning Terraform

Using Terraform with Azure is a great way to automate the creation and removal of resources in Azure. That’s the boring opening to what for me has been a fun adventure.
It starts like this: VP of my organization hands me a project that he had been personally overseeing. The team that doing the work had done a lot of discovery and had some stuff in place. I organized it into the product the VP and I had envisioned, and we started bringing into life.
The person who was in our DevOps role setup our build and release pipelines in Azure (we’re an Azure shop so this made complete sense). For our Azure resources he used Terraform. At the time I was used to ARM templates, but our organization had standardized on Terraform.
Things progressed, and our platform went live. Then one day my DevOps engineer disappeared. Poof! The person who knew how to get our stuff to production was simply gone. I had worked with him on a few things and had a general understanding of how it all worked so I was able to assume the role. That is how I got to know both Azure Pipelines and Terraform.
I’ll confess I’m skipping the exciting (stressful) stuff and I’m putting a happy spin on things. Regardless of the details though: I’m very much in favor of learning things by doing them. Yes, having experienced coaches and teachers is valuable, but learning to swim by jumping in to the deep end of the pool is an effective way to learn to swim. The prospect of drowning certainly focuses the mind.
Continuing the swimming analogy - I had lifeguards. My organization had a few other DevOps engineers who had a lot of experience with Terraform and they were able to guide me when I needed help (figuring out how to do certificates for API endpoints for example).