How to Create Environments at the Push of a Button

Being able to create and destroy environments at the push of a button can help you save vast amounts of time and money in software development. This guide will walk you through how to set up on-demand environments using Terraform and GitHub Actions, ensuring that your development, testing, and production environments are consistent and isolated from each other.

The Principle of Environment Design

Environments should be alike but share nothing - like identical twins who live in separate houses. The less variation between your dev, test, and prod environments, the fewer nasty surprises when code hits production. Isolation is key – think separate databases, hosting, and dependencies. In AWS, this means separate accounts for each environment. This way, a meltdown in your test environment won’t cause a ripple in production.

On-Demand Environments

On demand environments are spun up when needed and torn down when they’re not. This allows you to test each feature in its own sandbox, eliminating environment contention and reducing waiting times. This approach can significantly cut down your time-to-market and reduce costs by only running environments when they are actively used.

Getting Started: Step by Step with Terraform and GitHub Actions

In this tutorial, we'll focus on using Terraform and GitHub Actions to automate the creation and management of on-demand environments. Terraform will handle the infrastructure provisioning, while GitHub Actions will automate the workflow. However, the principles and steps outlined here can be adapted to other tools depending on your organisation's tech stack. Alternatives like AWS CloudFormation, Azure Resource Manager, or Jenkins can also be used to achieve similar results.

Step 1: Set Up Terraform

Write Terraform configurations to define your infrastructure. This includes everything from VPCs to EC2 instances.

Example:

provider "aws" {
  region = "us-west-2"
}

resource "aws_instance" "example" {
  ami           = "ami-0c55b159cbfafe1f0"
  instance_type = "t2.micro"

  tags = {
    Name = "example-instance"
  }
}

Commit your Terraform files to a GitHub repository. This ensures consistency and allows for easy rollback if something goes wrong.

Step 2: Integrate Terraform with GitHub Actions

GitHub Actions can automate your workflows, including environment setup. Here’s how:

Create a GitHub Actions Workflow File by adding a .github/workflows/main.yml file to your repository.

Example:

name: CI/CD Pipeline

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main
      - feature/*

jobs:
  terraform:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
    - name: Checkout code
      uses: actions/checkout@v2

    - name: Set up Terraform
      uses: hashicorp/setup-terraform@v1

    - name: Terraform Init
      run: terraform init

    - name: Terraform Apply
      run: terraform apply -auto-approve
      env:
        AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID: ${{ secrets.AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID }}
        AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY: ${{ secrets.AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY }}

When a new feature branch is pushed, GitHub Actions will trigger the creation of an environment.

Step 3: Data Management

Step 3: Data Management

Effective testing requires data that mirrors production. But using live data is a no-go due to privacy concerns. Here’s the solution:

• Build an ETL Pipeline: Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) pipelines can provide anonymised data dumps that reflect production data.

• Automate Data Injection: Ensure your on-demand environments are populated with this data as they spin up.

Example:

- name: Inject Data
  run: |
    mysql -h ${{ secrets.DB_HOST }} -u ${{ secrets.DB_USER }} -p${{ secrets.DB_PASS }} < data_dump.sql
  env:
    DB_HOST: ${{ secrets.DB_HOST }}
    DB_USER: ${{ secrets.DB_USER }}
    DB_PASS: ${{ secrets.DB_PASS }}

Step 4: Monitor and Optimise

Implement monitoring tools like Prometheus or CloudWatch to keep an eye on your environments.

Use the data from your monitoring tools to refine your processes. If something breaks, fix it and make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Practical Tips

• Standardise Environment Configuration: Use version control for your IaC scripts. This ensures consistency and allows for easy rollback if something goes wrong.

• Cloud Features: Use the features offered by your cloud provider. AWS, for instance, has services like CloudFormation and CodePipeline that can simplify your workflow.

• Security Best Practices: Always follow best practices for security. This includes encrypting sensitive data and managing access with IAM roles.

Wrapping Up

With Terraform and GitHub Actions (or similar tools), you can automate the setup and management of consistent, isolated environments, leading to faster delivery times and reduced costs.

If you need help implementing on-demand environment automation or have any questions about the process, Releaseworks experts can work with you to tailor solutions to your specific needs and ensure smooth integration into your existing workflows. Reach out today for a no-commitment discussion to understand how we can help you streamline your development process and achieve your goals.