Terraform Provider Iterative

Abstract

1. Introduction

TPI is a Terraform plugin built with machine learning in mind. This CLI tool offers full lifecycle management of computing resources (including GPUs and respawning spot instances) from several cloud vendors (AWS, Azure, GCP, K8s)... without needing to be a cloud expert.

TPI is a CLI tool, not a running service. It requires no additional orchestrating machine (control plane/head nodes) to schedule/recover/terminate instances. Instead, TPI runs (spot) instances via cloud-native scaling groups[^scalers], taking care of recovery and termination automatically on the cloud provider's side. This design reduces management overhead & infrastructure costs. You can close your laptop while cloud tasks are running — auto-recovery happens even if you are offline.

TPI provides consistent tooling for both data scientists and DevOps engineers, improving cross-team collaboration. This simplifies compute management to a single config file, and reduces time to deliver ML models into production.

2. Objective

☁️ Terraform plugin for machine learning workloads: spot instance recovery & auto-termination | AWS, GCP, Azure, Kubernetes

This project demonstrates how Go, Terraform can be applied to a real-world Blockchain & Cloud Computing problem.

4. Technology Stack

5. System Requirements

General requirements for this technology stack — check the README for exact versions.

• Go 1.20 or later
• Git (to clone the repository)

6. Installation & Setup

git clone https://github.com/iterative/terraform-provider-iterative.git
cd terraform-provider-iterative

Full setup instructions are in the project README.

7. Future Enhancements

Suggested extensions you can add to make this your own project.

• Add a CI/CD pipeline with GitHub Actions
• Deploy to a public test network or cloud free tier
• Add monitoring and cost alerts

8. Viva / Review Questions

Common questions examiners ask for projects in this domain.

1. Why does this problem need a blockchain or cloud-native design?
2. Explain the smart contract / infrastructure components and how they interact.
3. How are gas costs or cloud costs kept under control?
4. How is the system secured (keys, IAM, access control)?
5. How would the solution scale to many more users?

9. Source Code & License

This project is developed by iterative and published on GitHub under the Apache License 2.0. Please follow the license terms and credit the original author when you use or modify this code.