Written by Matt Ford Lead Platform Engineer
Back in the midst of time the Role-Profiles pattern that PuppetLabs promoted saved many a complex deployment. It was a way of using the configuration tool Puppet, that:
provided sensible abstractions
separated data and code
And it’s great to bring some of this to the world of Terraform and Kubernetes provisioning.
If you’ve worked on Terraform in more than one company you’ll likely have seen very different approaches to folder structure, module usage, and environment promotion. At CTS we’ve attempted to formalise our approach to infrastructure-as-code (IaC) somewhat based on the Role-Profile pattern. We’ve found that the Role-Profile pattern is a useful conceptual model that works across not only configuration (Puppet), but also resource provisioning (Terraform + Terragrunt), and application layer deployments in Kubernetes (Kustomize).