Terraform Best Practices for Implementing AppOps

Many organizations are using Kubernetes clusters to run their containers across many platforms, such as cloud-based and on-premises. Plus, they support every operating system compared to virtual machines and can share and run them in any above-mentioned environment and machines.

Additionally, many DevOps Solutions find difficulties in implementing, running, and managing Kubernetes clusters even after involving modernized efforts, like cloud-native and microservices. And to overcome such challenges, terraform – an open-source IaC software tool- is the most used in this area as it offers a variety of tools addressing such difficulties and allowing developers to develop and update Kubernetes clusters right from the CI/CD pipeline.

However, at some point, this modern Terraform limits its ability in the application deployment and management work due to IDP (Internal Developer Platform). Therefore, developers need an additional model to achieve these capabilities efficiently, and this model is known as AppOps.

AppOps is more like a DevOps Services that enforce security and governance policies across Kubernetes clusters and other infrastructures using a united definition model.

To achieve AppOps, you need to make out Terraform best practices, which are explained below:

Application Deployment:

It is critical for developers to acquire the ability to quickly deploy DevOps Solutions using the Kubernetes platform. DevOps teams should create and maintain Terraform templates for deployment processes to achieve development speed. However, many Terraform communities are available that enable DevOps developers to deploy applications individually.

Using Terraform as an IDP strategy, developers can address and deploy their application definitions without having knowledge about their underlying infrastructure (Kubernetes or Linux). Additionally, it automatically enforces the defined rules on the application deployment platform.

Define Policies:

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It is often challenging to maintain and govern policies in Kubernetes at scale for multiple teams and applications and necessary to achieve. But leveraging Terraform to the providers makes sense to quickly define various governance rules for activities, like resource utilization, role-based access control, registry operations, network configurations, and many others.

Here, we have listed a few parameters that every DevOps developer should consider while defining Kubernetes governance policies:

  

• Provisioner: To define the bounding of the framework, whether it follows a Kubernetes cluster or Linux server.
• Security: To ensure that the application goes through a security check before and after the deployment and list vulnerabilities whether to be considered or ignored.
• App Quota: Manages the scaling of applications, enforces controls to deploy applications, and Plan controls to set application memory and CPU consumption ratios.
• Network Policy: “Lists down” allow internal communication among DevOps services and allow developers to define their custom network policies (after application deployment).
• Container Policy: Defines controls for registries that need to be pulled for the application deployment and blocks images coming from unknown and suspicious sources.

After defining all these policies and parameters, Terraform and AppOps can allow developers to meet all application security needs. Plus, they can also use DevSecOps best practices that are user understandable rather than using complex policies.

Integrating Terraform in the Custom IDP Strategies:

As Terraform enables a private developer platform, developers can continuously observe applications and governance policies by closing the CI/CD and operations’ connected loop. It also allows developers to implement applications and get DevOps Services that include alerts in the active stack, enable application and policy monitoring, and audit report authorizations. This way, IDP provides an end-to-end AppOps model to the developers, which eases their Kubernetes cluster governance work.

Conclusion:

If developers take the help of third-party Terraform providers to implement AppOps, then they can reduce and even eliminate template overheads. With this, DevOps Solutions can efficiently concentrate on security and governance areas and quickly define new custom policies. In short, we can say, using a Terraform in the Kubernetes cluster, developers can smoothly deploy and manage applications on their own through completely configured IDP strategies.

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