Rebooting Andromeda Project

Going all in on Terraform

Some of the first blog posts I had on this website centered around my ‘Andromeda’ project. The idea of the project was to write up Terraform code to wrap around common services I used on AWS. It was a great concept, but unfortunately my energy and desires around the project died pretty quickly. I made half decent progress, at least writing some Terraform code. But it was very hard to actually extend that code to use it in any serious manner as I wasn’t using the Terraform principles around making it extendable, such as modules.

Enter 2022 (or 2021 technically when I started) and I was more set up than ever to give it another try. I think an issue I had previously was that when it came to modules, A) - I lacked some understanding and B) - I lacked the means of distributing those modules for my own consumption. Well fortunately, on A), I’ve developed a far greater understanding of the concept than before and I can confirm I’ve successfully implemented it. On B), again I’m gonna stand on my soap box to shill Gitlab. Gitlab has the ability to manage state along with acting as a module registry. I managed state previously with DynamoDB and S3, but I figured it was better to go all in here. I’m also able to have all of this done inside Gitlab CI which is amazing. I have encountered some performance issues with my pipelines, which I’ll talk about in the future, but for the most part, they’re working.

So, you can expect some more posts around Terraform and AWS in the near future here. I’ve been really happy with what I’ve accomplished so far and I’m looking forward to reaching my ultimate goal, which is a full tear down and repave of my AWS footprint with Terraform. I would love to implement some best practices from the very start and get rid of any potential cob webs from my initial set up days, way back in 2016 now! It’s been a fun ride and I’m ready to have some more fun!