Optimizing Terraform Integration Inside GitLab CI/CD Pipelines

Niels Peto & Nicolas Pepinster are using Terraform extensively to deploy their applications and their underlying infrastructures in the cloud and on-premises. They want their experience and setup to inspire and provide guidance to others.

Problem statement

How do you allow development teams to be autonomous in their effort to bring the business' ideas to life by giving them early feedback on their infrastructure definitions' potential issues and ensuring that those definitions are compliant with security, architecture, compliance guidelines, and best practices?

What You'll Learn

In this talk you'll learn the best practices they use for deploying AWS cloud infrastructure for a financial institution inside a GitLab CI/CD pipeline. We'll help you think about these aspects: - Backend in S3 - State lock in DynamoDB - terraform validate as soon as possible to provide quick feedback to developers - Merge request approval by the Terraform specialists - Integrated terraform-compliance checks in the CI/CD pipeline to be sure nothing wrong will be deployed in production - Usage of remote states to use their outputs, etc.

Speakers: Niels Peto & Nicolas Pepinster

Slides here