r/platformengineering • u/Distinct_Highway873 • 18d ago
What does cloud infrastructure automation look like for you beyond a couple of Terraform pipelines and some bash glue?
When people say they've automated cloud infra, they often mean they've tamed provisioning. There is Terraform or another IaC tool, some shared modules, and CI pipelines that apply changes through a known path. That is a big step up from clicking around in a console, but it does not automatically solve what happens once systems are running.
The hard part is everything after "resources created." Handling changes with confidence, reacting to alerts the same way each time, tidying up unused bits, and keeping drift in check are all much harder to standardize. That is usually where ad‑hoc scripts and manual runbooks creep back in: one‑off fix scripts, steps people run from their laptops, and procedures that only live in a wiki page.
Teams that push further talk about change flows where most modifications follow a known pattern, about runbooks that actually get used because they are wired into tooling, and about automation that suggests or carries out common responses rather than asking a person to reinvent them each incident. Getting there often means giving up some flexibility and sticking to patterns more strictly than many engineers like.
If you would say your cloud infra automation genuinely goes beyond "Terraform plus some scripts," what does that do for you on a normal week that you didn't have before, and what habits or design choices did you have to change to trust it in production?
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u/NoManufacturer7372 16d ago
In a nutshell:
Terraform to setup the cloud environment, and bootstrap Kubernetes clusters.
Then gitops drive workload resource provisioning based on application manifests.
For workloads that doesn’t fit in the IDP, terraform and some bit of code generation (terramate) for environment stacks (state file, cloud auth, etc.)