Terraform, Collaboration and DevOps

DevOps is about collaboration. One of the most effective ways to collaborate is through code. Code gives us a common representation that everyone can learn and use to understand how something is built. Enter Terraform: a coding language that builds infrastructure. With Terraform, we now have a common language that everyone can learn and use to understand how infrastructure is built and configured. Terraform can configure many different clouds including AWS, GCP and Azure.

In this talk, I'll introduce Terraform and live demo creating infrastructure with it. I'll discuss the pros and cons of using Terraform to manage your infrastructure. Then I'll cover how to enable collaboration through Terraform and demo an open source tool for collaborating on Terraform via pull request called Atlantis (runatlantis.io).

Transcript

1. lkysow Terraform, Collaboration and DevOps
2. lkysow Hello
4. lkysow What we'll learn: 1. Terraform 2. Benefits of codification of infrastructure 3. Benefits of Terraform collaboration
5. lkysow
6. lkysow Beginning: 30 developers, 5 operators, 1 monolith Microservices → Terraform → Terraform Collaboration End: 200 developers, 30 operators, 100+ microservices
7. lkysow JIRA Tickets and Shenanigans
8. lkysow
9. lkysow
10. lkysow anubhavm
11. lkysow
12. lkysow Benefits: Less Mistakes Faster
13. lkysow Details: Started with new services Tagged resources: “terraform" = true .tfvars files for environments: terraform plan -var-file staging.tfvars Multiple repos and remote state

14. lkysow
15. lkysow So you learned how to program…
16. lkysow Terraform Collaboration Issues: 1. Reviewing diffs 2. Terraform state out of sync with code
17. lkysow Atlantis github.com/runatlantis/atlantis
18. lkysow Atlantis Solved: 1. Reviewing diffs 2. Terraform state out of sync with code 3. Approvals
19. lkysow
20. lkysow So you learned what a pull request is…
21. But then something cool started to happen…
22. lkysow
23. lkysow Beginning: 30 developers, 5 operators, 1 monolith Microservices → Terraform → Terraform Collaboration End: 200 developers, 30 operators, 100+ microservices
24. lkysow What we learned: 1. Terraform 2. Benefits of codification of infrastructure 3. Benefits of Terraform collaboration
25. lkysow What Is The Goal? Build software better and faster Be happy while doing it
26. lkysow How Do We Get There? Shared goal Different skillsets working together
27. lkysow
28. lkysow
29. lkysow “…keeping system and application configuration in version control was more highly correlated with software delivery performance than keeping application code in version control." “Our recommendation based on these results is to use a lightweight change approval process based on peer review.”
30. lkysow lkysow github.com/runatlantis/atlantis terraform.io Thanks to @sethvargo and @anuvhavm