Terraform for Panorama Configuration management

[batd2]

Hi all

Do you use Terraform for managing Panorama configuration and particularly routine security policies creation and changes? Is there any issues and do you have any feedback? 

I know this can be done well with Ansible, but for number of reasons Ansible cannot be used in our case. 

[JimmyHolland]

Hi @batd2, there are a number of organisations using Terraform to configure their PAN-OS appliances. If you are familiar with Terraform already, the reference documentation is very useful and can be found here in Terraform Registry, otherwise "get started" with Terraform concepts in general first, then move onto PAN-OS configuration. Configuration work for objects and security policies is a common use case. I will let others contribute with their experiences here as they wish...

[batd2]

@JimmyHolland Thank you for the information. The reason I am asking is because it is kind of suggested that Terraform is used for the initial build and initial configuration, rather than configuration management. 

[JimmyHolland · Accepted solution]

@batd2 Yes, there is a common pattern in the industry, particularly around cloud infrastructure, that revolves around Terraform for build/deploy, and Ansible for configuration. The truth is that you could use either for both tasks, you have to decide as a team/organisation which tools make sense for you. You could go all-in on one tool for everything, or separate tools for separate jobs. Your organisation may invest in the paid version of one of those tools which means you have a vendor-supported product rather then OSS, which may affect the decision. There's lots of factors. As they both have OSS versions, you can try out both and pick the one(s) you like for the specific task(s) you wish to undertake 🙂

[GabrielMontiel]

Hi i recently created a small tool to import security policies from panorama xml to terraform code you might want to look it up https://live.paloaltonetworks.com/t5/automation-api-discussions/import-existing-security-policies-fr...