Learn Terrantula
This section teaches you to think in Terrantula before you type a single command.
If you came in through the Quickstart — imported a .tfstate file and opened the dashboard — you've already seen the payoff: your whole fleet on one screen. But you imported into a model you didn't design. This section is where you learn that model: what the pieces are, why they're shaped the way they are, and how to start describing your own fleet instead of someone else's defaults.
We teach concepts first and commands later, on purpose. The reference pages will always be there when you need the exact field name. What's harder to pick up by skimming is the mental model — the reason Terrantula has entities and cells and relationships instead of just "resources." Get the model right and the commands write themselves.
Who this is for
Terrantula is built for people running fleets of templated infrastructure — per-tenant stacks, per-customer environments, multi-region cluster pools — where the population matters more than any single instance. If you've ever managed the same Terraform a hundred times for a hundred tenants, this is for you. If you're not there yet but your infrastructure is sprawling and invisible, the on-ramp meets you where you are.
You don't need to be an expert to follow along. You do need to know roughly what Terraform does and to have run it (or watched it run) at least once.
Reading order
Follow these in sequence. Each page ends pointing at the next.
- The Cattle Mindset — the why. Why naming every stack by hand stops scaling, and what "herding" looks like instead. Read this first even if you're impatient; it's the lens for everything else.
- Core Concepts — the what. Entities, Entity Types, Cells, Relationships, Relationship Types, Actions, Secrets, and the cascade. The full vocabulary, taught one concept at a time.
- Catalog YAML Guide — the shape. How those concepts map onto the declarative YAML you'll actually write, walked through with real snippets from the canonical demos.
- Define your first cell — the bridge. Your first hands-on config: define a cell, the unit of tenant placement, and watch entities join it.
When you finish, you'll be ready for Your First Fleet — the guided, end-to-end build of all the primitives in order.
You can read these pages in any order if you just want a specific concept. But if you're new to the fleet-shaped way of modeling infrastructure, the linear path above is the fastest way to a working mental model.
Next: The Cattle Mindset →