Infrastructure as Code

Overview Last year I was setting up an IaC system for an e-commerce client. When I took over, their Terraform codebase looked roughly like this: three environments (dev/staging/prod), each with its own copy of the configuration, totaling over 3,000 lines—90% of which was copy-paste. Changing a VPC CIDR meant editing three files in sync. Miss one, and you get environment drift. The worst part: a security group rule was missing in prod for three months without anyone noticing....

Overview At 3 AM, your phone vibrates. An alert message: a major cloud provider’s East China region storage service is experiencing widespread unavailability. Your core business is fully deployed in this region, with the primary database there too. The outage has lasted 12 minutes, customers are complaining, and your boss is asking “how long to recover” in the group chat. You know the truth: the cross-region disaster recovery plan was reviewed six months ago but got cut due to “high costs....