Deploy identical Development and Production environments using Terraform

Surpass is a strategic projects company that built a public-transportation planning system. They created a web app to allow Public Transportation Designers to create and test how new transportation lines would behave, work, and impact current traffic and usage.

Their state when they met us:

• Basic app, running locally on the developers' computers.
• No ability to work with the users.
• No environments set, or a possibility to collaborate live with other developers.
• No deployment pipelines or version management.

1. Fully managed IaC-based infrastructure & environments.
2. Developers' freedom, accessibility, and ease of use.

We accounted for the following security-related restrictions:

• Geo-based access restriction.
• Usage of WAF & CloudFront.
• A solid access control system for the internal (Private VPC) system.

The goals, decisions, and restrictions led to the following strategy:

1. Use Terragrunt to re-use Terraform code, ensuring better observability of environments and resources. This approach allowed us to change only configuration values between environments, avoiding changes to actual code logic.
2. Manage all secrets in AWS Secrets Manager, accessing values from GitHub Action Pipelines with multiple values set per environment.
3. Deploy the Dev stack first, then build Staging and Production environments to improve stability, applying the same strategy for later additions.
4. Create sub-projects following the same method.
5. Define the correct CI/CD pipelines and branch protections for an optimal review and deployment flow.

The process of creating Surpass' infrastructure was methodical and detailed:

1. Create the Terraform module, deploy it using Terragrunt, and check for usability.
2. Request feedback from the Dev team or the customer and make adjustments.
3. Manage and organize the code and Infrastructure modules.

This iterative methodology allowed us to:

• Be agile.
• Re-use code.
• Adhere to customer and developer requirements.
• Deliver value quickly, in small and manageable parts, while keeping everything tidy and neat.