Building Dynamic Configuration into Terraform

Date	Tuesday, 25 October, 2022 - 14:25–14:40
Presenter	Isabelle Miller and Hosh Sadiq, LaunchDarkly
URL	https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon22emea/presentation/miller

Abstract

What if platform teams could define safe, controlled entry points for developers and managers to update and manage infrastructure and services without directly touching the configurations or the repositories themselves?

This talk covers the complexities of managing Terraform at scale and how you can consolidate and simplify certain processes by extracting configuration values into an external interface. We’ll detail the process we went through to enable platform engineers to dynamically edit their Terraform configurations on the fly without having to push it through a whole release and apply process.

Notes

• Twitter handles: @hoshsadiq and @sl0loris
• Context: Startup, started with all Terraform code in one repo.
• Using LaunchDarkly feature flags as Terraform data sources. Advantages:
  • Changing of simple values avoids the overhead of PR workflows
  • Leverage feature management platform for further access control