Terraforming RDS: What Instacart Learned Managing Over 50 AWS RDS PostgreSQL Instances with Terraform

Managing a broad array of infrastructure resources can be challenging as a company grows. But with the adoption of infrastructure as code, documenting your resources, and maintaining your standards is far more manageable.

Instacart's Terraform Case Study

At Instacart they've gone all-in on infrastructure as code with Terraform on AWS. This includes more than 50 RDS Postgres instances and PGBouncers. Migrating to Terraform is a big investment and RDS instances are particularly complex to describe and manage. In two years of using Terraform, the infrastructure team and data store working groups at Instacart have automated and refined management of Instacart's resources in Terraform.

What You'll Learn

This session touches on the history of Instacart's database growth from one instance to dozens of hand-crafted ones and how they eventually achieved consistency using Terraform. Muffy Barkocy will cover what they've learned about managing RDS instances, both with and without Terraform, along with the benefits and potential pitfalls of using Terraform with RDS.

The presentation will show you how to create, update, and delete RDS Postgres instances, parameter groups, and EC2 instances running PGBouncers, all using Terraform modules.

After this session, you’ll be able to manage your own RDS instances with Terraform with confidence.

Slides