IaC Productivity
Cloud computing enables companies to scale seamlessly and leverage a broad range of cutting-edge services. However, practice shows that teams often struggle to automate and operate infrastructure concerns in a scalable way. Söldner Consult’s IaC Productivity Solution supports you with ready-to-use and extensible IaC pipelines, pre-built Terraform modules, and modern GitOps methodologies.
IaC Productivity Benefits
Standardization
Short Time-to-Market
Better Performance
Terraform Modules
Utilize ready-made Terraform modules to implement all common use cases.
Self-Service Pipeline
GitOps Process
What Does the IaC Productivity Solution Include?
- A mature and extensible IaC GitLab DevOps pipeline for creating Terraform modules. The created and selected Terraform modules adhere to proven Terraform best practices, are security-hardened by default, well-documented, and tested.
- Tooling for Terraform-based provisioning. Best practices such as linting, security checks, testing, and cost analysis are enforced during provisioning. Additionally, you have access to cost estimates. The tooling is graphically integrated into your DevOps platform and based on open-source standards.
- With pre-selected IaC modules, you don’t need to develop modules yourself but can leverage ready-made and hardened ones. Using pre-built blueprints (e.g., Kubernetes + DB deployment), you can set up environments within minutes.
- Integration with secret managers like Hashicorp Vault, Google Secret Manager, AWS Secret Manager, or Azure Key Vault. This ensures application pipelines only have the permissions they need, preventing secret exposure.
Included Tools in the IaC Productivity Solution
Integrated Modules in the Pipeline:
Infracost: An open-source tool that helps developers and DevOps teams estimate the cost of cloud infrastructure managed with Terraform code. It integrates cost estimates directly into development and deployment processes, providing insights into the financial impact of infrastructure changes.
Checkov: An open-source static code analysis tool specifically designed to check Infrastructure as Code (IaC). It identifies security and configuration errors in IaC definitions before they are deployed to production environments. For Terraform, Checkov offers features such as security checks, compliance enforcement, easy integration, reporting, and custom policies.
Terraform Docs: A tool specifically designed to automate documentation for Terraform modules. It analyzes Terraform configuration files and automatically generates structured and readable documentation, helping developers understand and utilize Terraform modules.
EditorConfig: A tool and file format that helps developers maintain consistent coding styles across different editors and IDEs. It ensures code is uniformly formatted regardless of the editor or IDE used.
Terraform visualization for a graphical representation of Terraform deployments.
Terratest for automated module testing.
Ease of Use
Extensibility
The IaC Productivity pipelines are designed to be easily customized and extended.
Full GitOps Support
- The IaC Productivity Solution supports the full IaC GitOps process, including versioning and the “repository per environment” strategy.
- Support for approvals.
- Capability for merge requests.
- Dedicated pipelines for module creation and deployment processes.
Integration of Pre-Built Blueprints
The IaC Productivity Solution allows the integration of pre-built blueprints, enabling a self-service catalog for common application scenarios such as Kubernetes deployments, data solutions, or factories. This increases efficiency and reduces onboarding time for new applications.
Graphical Support
The IaC Productivity Solution provides graphical support in GitLab, Azure DevOps, and GitHub for common Terraform commands:
- Terraform plan
- Terraform apply
- Terraform destroy
- Terraform state list
- Terraform state rm
- Terraform state mv
- Terraform import
