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Case studyPlatform and infrastructure owner2022 - 2024

Infrastructure & Delivery Control Plane

Terraform + CI/CD architecture

Reduced environment drift and improved deployment speed with safer release paths.

Context

Environment drift and manual deployment steps created operational risk and slowed release velocity.

Constraints
  • Environments had to remain deployable throughout migration to module standards.
  • Team access controls needed tightening without blocking delivery.
  • Release cadence could not regress during CI/CD redesign.

Architecture

Standardized infrastructure as code with Terraform modules, promotion-based CI/CD, and OIDC-backed cloud access.

Step 1
Terraform modules

Infrastructure is defined with shared modules for consistent multi-environment provisioning.

Step 2
Container build pipeline

CI builds and scans images before promotion to deployment stages.

Step 3
Promotion gates

Branch-based promotion controls rollout across sandbox, staging, and production.

Step 4
OIDC cloud access

Short-lived role assumption replaces static credentials in deployment workflows.

Terraform module standardization

Tradeoff: Required upfront migration time, but reduced configuration drift long term.

Promotion-based deployment flow

Tradeoff: Introduced stricter gates, but improved release safety and reproducibility.

OIDC role assumption

Tradeoff: Added identity setup complexity, but removed long-lived static cloud credentials.

Execution

Standardized infrastructure across sandbox, staging, and production with Terraform-managed AWS resources.

Implemented branch-based promotion, Docker/ECR pipelines, and OIDC-based deployment workflows.

Improved consistency, delivery speed, and long-term maintainability of platform operations.

Impact

Reduced deployment variance across environments through module standardization.

Lowered credential management risk with short-lived OIDC role assumption.

Shortened lead time by automating promotion and release checks in CI/CD.

TerraformGitLab CI/CDECSALBRoute53OIDC

Lessons

  • Module naming and ownership standards should be set before broad migration.
  • Security controls are adopted faster when they reduce toil as well as risk.

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