Managing Multi-Region AWS Infrastructure with Terraform

The Danger of ClickOps

Manually configuring cloud infrastructure via the AWS Console is a recipe for disaster. Environments drift, configurations are forgotten, and disaster recovery is impossible.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is the solution. At Slickrock, we define every cloud resource using Terraform.

Reusable Terraform Modules

We build reusable modules for common architecture patterns. For example, deploying a highly-available RDS database:

module "db" {
  source  = "terraform-aws-modules/rds/aws"
  version = "~> 6.0"

  identifier = "enterprise-prod-db"
  engine     = "postgres"
  engine_version = "15"
  instance_class = "db.t4g.large"
  
  allocated_storage = 100
  multi_az         = true
  
  vpc_security_group_ids = [aws_security_group.db.id]
  subnet_ids             = module.vpc.database_subnets
}

The Workflow

1. Code: Infrastructure changes are submitted via Pull Request.
2. Plan: CI runs terraform plan to show exactly what resources will be created/destroyed.
3. Apply: Upon approval, terraform apply executes the changes.

This guarantees that our Staging and Production environments are 100% identical, eliminating "it works in staging" bugs.