There’s a lot to learn from orgs who’ve figured out how to roll out Terraform for their platform setup (at scale) the hard way.

Let’s get bakin’ 🥐

Two patterns to make Terraform at scale easier 📈

If your organization is invested in Infrastructure as Code (IaC), you’ve probably heard of Terraform. It’s the default choice for a reason, but that doesn’t make it any less difficult to configure properly, especially at scale. But there are two patterns that can make it easier: landing zones and service catalogs.

1. Landing zones 🛬

Landing zones are the foundation of your platform. They handle resource organization, billing, policy management, networking, and identity and access management (IAM). The idea is for landing zones to provide a basic framework for end users to consume. Environments are automatically configured to meet your organization’s security and compliance requirements, so users can self-serve and deploy much easier.

2. Service catalogs 📚

Company-wide or team-specific service catalogs can enable your engineering teams to deploy services complete with the necessary backing infrastructure. They simplify deployments that involve many moving parts (like a service from K8s that requires a database deployed on AWS, Google Cloud, or a multi-cloud environment). You can also create and approve reusable patterns to meet your scalability, compliance, and availability requirements in advance. This is a much easier way to set standards.

Most importantly, service catalogs promote easy-to-use APIs and abstract complexity away from developers. Users can build catalogs on top of open-source base modules or bundle multiple modules and resources together without needing to master all of the intricacies of the underlying services you’ve packaged together.

💡 Ultimately, Terraform is just a technology. If you want to get the most out of it, you have to think about it in the context of your workflows. The tools in your ecosystem should be the means, not the end.

Want to dive deeper into landing zones? On 12/1, Mineiros CEO Sören Martius will share how to accelerate your cloud adoption with landing zones.

Short on time? ⏳ We got you 🥐😋

Buckle your seatbelt 💺 because platform engineering is really taking off 🚀

🥐 Gartner is hyped for platform engineering! They just released an article explaining what Platform Engineering is. Happy reading!

🥐 O’Reilly released October's Radar Trends and highlighted platform engineering as an alternative to both DevOps and SRE.

🥐 Platform Engineering: is it the evolution of DevOps or just a fancy rebrand? George Hantzaras shares his thoughts on OpenObservability Talks 🎙️

🥐 Is platform engineering the path to DevOps success? This article by Michael Mueller says yes.

🥐 We all know that feeling...

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Stay crunchy 🥐

Luca