Enhanced Experience for HCP Terraform Workspace Users

Scaling Cloud Infrastructure with HCP Terraform: Streamlining Onboarding for Multiple Teams

In the contemporary landscape of cloud computing, efficiently managing and scaling infrastructure is paramount for organizations. HashiCorp’s HCP Terraform emerges as a powerful tool that allows businesses to effectively scale their cloud infrastructure. However, as organizations broaden their usage to encompass multiple teams, each with its unique requirements and workflows, they encounter distinct challenges. This article delves into how organizations can automate their HCP Terraform workspace setup utilizing the TFE provider and a custom onboarding module, ensuring a seamless and efficient onboarding process.

Understanding the Common Scenario

Let’s consider a hypothetical tech company, HashiCups, as a case study. HashiCups’ platform team has successfully established their initial cloud landing zones using HCP Terraform. For clarity, a cloud landing zone is a pre-configured, secure, and scalable environment that acts as a foundation for deploying and managing cloud resources.

With the groundwork laid, HashiCups is now poised to onboard its application teams onto HCP Terraform. This is the initial step in a broader strategy to integrate many teams. They quickly realize that manually setting up and configuring workspaces for each team is both time-consuming and susceptible to errors. The need for an automated onboarding process that is efficient, scalable, and consistent becomes apparent.

Automating Onboarding with Terraform

To tackle these challenges, HashiCups intends to introduce an additional abstraction layer to codify and automate the onboarding setup for HCP Terraform workspaces, teams, and processes. Terraform will once again serve as the engine, with the TFE provider playing a crucial role.

The TFE provider enables the creation of a reusable Terraform module, which we’ll refer to as the "workspace onboarding module." This module encapsulates best practices for workspace creation, permission management, and team onboarding. With this approach, HashiCups can scale effortlessly as they incorporate more teams into their infrastructure as code (IaC) ecosystem.

Onboarding the First Team

The onboarding process at HashiCups begins with a meeting between the platform and application teams. The platform team has two primary objectives:

1. Quickly enable the application team to become operational.
2. Develop and test a reusable onboarding pattern—codified in a Terraform module—to identify and resolve potential issues before extending it to other teams.

   During the initial meeting, the platform team seeks to understand:

   • The application team’s familiarity with HCP Terraform workspaces.
   • The structure of their environment landscape, including the promotion path from development to testing and production.
   • The individuals authorized to modify infrastructure configurations and whether these permissions vary by environment.
     

     HCP Terraform Workspace: A Primer
     

     In HCP Terraform, a workspace is a fundamental concept used to organize infrastructure as code. Workspaces are isolated environments where specific teams or working groups manage a distinct set of infrastructure resources. Each workspace maintains its own state file, which is crucial for tracking the current state of the infrastructure and ensuring Terraform can accurately plan and apply changes.

     Recommended Practices for Workspace Scoping
     

     A recommended practice is to structure the HCP Terraform setup so that each workspace corresponds to specific criteria, such as:

   • Business unit
   • Application name
   • Infrastructure layer
   • Promotion path environment (e.g., development, testing, production)
   • Region

     For instance, workspace names for a simple application could include bu1-billing-prod-us-east for production in the US East region and bu1-billing-staging-us-east for the staging environment. In more complex scenarios, teams may need to divide workspaces into smaller scopes, especially when managing numerous resources.

     The key takeaway is that workspace scopes should be delineated to:

3. Limit the potential impact or "blast radius" of any change-related failures.
4. Prevent performance degradations from affecting other workspaces.
5. Accommodate varying infrastructure sizing and configuration needs for development, testing, and production.
   

   Gathering Requirements for the Onboarding Module
   

   Having discussed the above points, the HashiCups platform team gathers requirements from the application team, which uses a three-environment landscape: development, staging, and production. Additional requirements, gathered through meetings with stakeholders such as security and operations leadership, include:

   • Each application team should have an administrative group for workspace management and a user group with necessary permissions.
   • Commands that can remove data, like terraform destroy, should be restricted in production.
   • Workspace naming conventions should be standardized, using a format like <application>-<environment>, and all names should be lowercase.
   • The production environment identifier should be used for environments accessed by end users.
     

     Creating a Reusable Onboarding Module
     

     The workspace onboarding module will generate the necessary workspaces for the first application team. Instead of hardcoding team-specific requirements, the module will include variable fields that allow customization for any team within the organization.

     Creating Variable Definitions
     

     The variables are defined in a variables.tf file, including:

   • application_id: Holds the unique application identifier.
   • admin_team_name: Holds the name of the HCP Terraform team representing the application administrators.
   • user_team_name: Holds the name of the HCP Terraform team representing the application infrastructure engineers or developers.
   • environment_names: Holds the list of environment names (e.g., development, production).

     A validation block ensures the environment names list contains a "prod" environment, as per organizational requirements.

     Defining Workspaces
     

     The main.tf file defines the workspaces and team permissions. For the production environment workspace, configurations are set to prevent destroy plans. String interpolation is used for naming workspaces according to the organization’s naming convention.

     Outputting Workspace Information
     

     Outputs are essential in infrastructure as code for enabling composition. The outputs.tf file shares the IDs of the created workspaces and the admin and user teams.

     Testing the Module
     

     Testing is crucial to ensure that module updates do not introduce bugs or break existing functionality. Terraform tests are stored in the module code repository under the tests directory.

     Setting Up and Running Tests
     

     Tests validate that the module behaves as expected, such as detecting invalid environment landscapes and ensuring workspace names are lowercase. Running the test suite requires access to HCP Terraform and an API token with permissions to create teams.

     Enhancements and Documentation
     

     The module can be enhanced by integrating HCP Terraform projects, workspace notifications, dynamic provider credentials, and comprehensive module lifecycle management.

     Projects and Notifications
     

     Projects group related workspaces, simplifying configuration. Notifications can alert external systems about significant events like configuration drift or plan errors.

     Dynamic Provider Credentials
     

     Dynamic credentials offer improved security by generating short-lived access keys on-demand, reducing the risk of unauthorized access.

     Lifecycle Management
     

     Lifecycle management encompasses version control, testing, publishing, and deprecation handling, ensuring modules are well-managed throughout their lifecycle.

     Conclusion
     

     By automating the onboarding process with a reusable Terraform module, organizations like HashiCups can efficiently scale their cloud infrastructure management across multiple teams. This approach ensures consistency, reduces the potential for errors, and allows teams to focus on their core activities, driving innovation and growth. For further exploration, resources on publishing Terraform modules and utilizing advanced HCP Terraform features are available.

     For more information, visit HashiCorp’s resource page.

For more Information, Refer to this article.