Loading…
For new environments: full infrastructure design before any Terraform is written. For existing environments: inventory of current resources, identification of what to bring under IaC management first, and assessment of import vs. redeploy approach for each resource type.
Module structure, naming conventions, variable design, and output definitions — documented before any modules are written. The module architecture is a design artifact, not a consequence of how the code evolved.
Core modules written and tested independently with minimal example configurations. Modules reviewed for correctness, security configuration defaults, and documentation completeness before root modules are composed on top of them.
Bring us the constraint. We'll bring the team.
A GCP environment managed primarily through the console becomes unmanageable at a surprisingly low level of complexity. After a certain number of projects, VPCs, IAM bindings, and service configurations, nobody knows the complete state of the environment. Changes happen without documentation. Environments drift from each other. The staging environment that was supposed to mirror production has been modified so many times that it no longer does.
Infrastructure as Code disciplines away these problems. When infrastructure is defined in Terraform, the state of the environment is represented in files that are version-controlled, reviewed, and applied through a pipeline. The diff between what is defined and what is running is always visible. Environments can be reproduced from the code. Changes require review before they are applied.
Flat Terraform configurations that put all resources in a single directory do not scale. We design modular Terraform architectures: reusable modules for repeatable infrastructure patterns (VPCs, GKE clusters, Cloud SQL instances), composed by root modules that define the specific instances of those patterns in each environment. Modules are versioned and tested independently.
Terraform state stored in Cloud Storage with object versioning enabled. State locking via Cloud Storage lock objects to prevent concurrent apply operations. Separate state files per environment (development, staging, production) so that a failed apply in one environment cannot corrupt the state of another.
The same Terraform module code runs across all environments, parameterized for environment-specific values (instance sizes, replica counts, backup schedules). Environment-specific configuration in a separate variables file or environment-specific Terragrunt configuration layer — not conditional logic inside the module that makes it impossible to reason about what each environment will look like.
Infrastructure changes follow the same review-and-deploy process as application code: pull request triggers a Terraform plan, the plan is reviewed as part of the code review, merge to the main branch triggers apply against the target environment. `terraform plan` output is annotated on the pull request so reviewers see the exact changes being proposed. Policy enforcement using tools such as tflint and OPA/Sentinel for cloud governance policy compliance validation before apply.
For teams with existing GCP environments not currently managed by Terraform, we perform Terraform import of the critical infrastructure — bringing it under IaC management without reprovisioning. We identify and document any resources that cannot be cleanly imported and provide a remediation path.
CI/CD pipeline for Terraform: plan on pull request with plan output annotation, apply on merge with Slack or email notification. Policy-as-code checks integrated before plan. State backend configured.
Infrastructure applied to all environments in sequence. Drift between the applied state and any manually managed resources resolved. Terraform repository with README, module documentation, and an IaC runbook handed over to the infrastructure team.