Terraform: Up & Running, 2nd Edition

Chapter 6. Production-Grade Terraform Code

Building production-grade infrastructure is difficult. And stressful. And time consuming. By production-grade infrastructure, I mean the servers, data stores, load balancers, security functionality, monitoring and alerting tools, building pipelines, and all the other pieces of your technology that are necessary to run a business. Your company is placing a bet on you: it’s betting that your infrastructure won’t fall over if traffic goes up, or lose your data if there’s an outage, or allow that data to be compromised when hackers try to break in—and if that bet doesn’t work out, your company can go out of business. That’s what’s at stake when I refer to production-grade infrastructure in this chapter.

I’ve had the opportunity to work with hundreds of companies, and based on all of these experiences, here’s roughly how long you should expect your next production-grade infrastructure project to take:

• If you want to deploy a service fully managed by a third party, such as running MySQL using the AWS Relational Database Service (RDS), you can expect it to take you one to two weeks to get that service ready for production.

• If you want to run your own stateless distributed app, such as a cluster of Node.js apps that don’t store any data locally (e.g., they store all their data in RDS) running on top of an AWS Auto Scaling Group (ASG), that will take roughly twice as long, or about two to four weeks to get ready for production.

• If you want ...